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overwatch
climber
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Seems like an on topic post from end wrecker...disguises for the anti-governmentals
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HighTraverse
Trad climber
Bay Area
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Jul 14, 2014 - 04:10pm PT
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Weapon theft?
Opiate addiction?
Poster boy for the right wing whackos. Even better than Rush Limberger.
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survival
Big Wall climber
Terrapin Station
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Jul 14, 2014 - 04:56pm PT
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That's awesome, Cliven's kid is a doper.
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Fritz
Trad climber
Choss Creek, ID
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Jul 14, 2014 - 06:57pm PT
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Per the above posts and the link from Stahlbro.
http://news.msn.com/crime-justice/bundy-son-facing-arrest-in-separate-criminal-case
LAS VEGAS (AP) — The adult son of a Nevada rancher who hosted armed protesters against federal agents in a cattle roundup dispute in April acknowledged Monday that he faces arrest in a separate criminal case stemming from his felony conviction on burglary and weapon charges.
Cliven Lance Bundy, 34, said during a telephone interview with The Associated Press that he knows he's named in a contempt-of-court warrant issued July 8 in Las Vegas for failing to appear before a Clark County District Court judge who oversees a drug diversion program.
"I'm trying to get ahold of my counselor to see what I'm supposed to do," said Lance Bundy, who is not currently represented by a lawyer.
Bundy said he underwent outpatient surgery the day the warrant was issued and has been recuperating at his parents' home in Bunkerville, about 80 miles northeast of Las Vegas.
The court record shows Bundy missed several previous hearings, and that officials said they were unable to reach him to notify him of court dates.
He could face two to eight years in state prison if he is found in violation of terms of the five years' probation imposed after he pleaded guilty in February 2013 to felony burglary and weapon theft charges.
Bundy attributed his conviction to an addiction to opiate pain killers, and said he has been getting counseling.
Bundy's parents, Cliven and Carol Bundy, said they thought their son obtained medical releases from the court-ordered drug program.
Yes! Another "poster-child" for the right-wing---wingnuts to love. After all, he stole weapons. What's Rong with that?
Anything is all-right if you are far-right & supported by Rong!
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HighTraverse
Trad climber
Bay Area
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From the "It ain't over till it's over" department.
The Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility organization.
They have published a Dept of Homeland Security Intelligence Assessment on the increased risk of domestic violence arising from or related to Bundyville.
http://www.peer.org/news/news-releases/2014/07/31/extremist-anti-government-militias-on-the-rise/
An Intelligence Assessment from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security dated July 22, 2014, titled “Domestic Violent Extremists Pose Increased Threat to Government Officials and Law Enforcement,” notes that, “After years of only sporadic violence from violent domestic extremists motivated by anti-government ideologies, I&A (Office of Intelligence and Analysis) has seen a spike within the past year in violence. Based upon reports from state and federal law enforcement reports, this Assessment finds:
“I&A assesses that perceived victory by militia extremists in a show of force against the Department of Interior’s Bureau of Land Management (BLM) in Nevada in April will likely inspire additional anti-government violence over the next year.”
“I&A also assesses that the recent murders of two Las Vegas police officers is the latest and most severe in a growing trend of anti-government violence…” and
The “perceived victory” from the Bundy stand-off “is galvanizing some individuals – particularly militia extremists and violent lone offenders – to actively confront law enforcement officials, increasing the likelihood of violence.”
The complete Intelligence Assessment published in July is here:
http://www.peer.org/assets/docs/blm/7_31_14_DHS_assessment.pdf
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HighTraverse
Trad climber
Bay Area
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couchmaster
I made no claims or comment. I simply quoted some important information.
However you goad me into making a comment.
Isn't it ironic that many who were so eager for a Dept Of Homeland Security when Al Queda was the threat are now so quick to ascribe ulterior motives to that department when a domestic terrorist threat is identified?
Or what really was your point?
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WBraun
climber
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Here is your domestic and world terrorist threats. These guys are number one and destroyed millions and millions of lives and still doing it.
Stooopid Americans ......
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thebravecowboy
climber
strugglin' to make time to climb
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so what are you doing about it Werner? what did you do when they were in office of power? blame stupid americans?
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Wade Icey
Trad climber
www.alohashirtrescue.com
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i'm guessing the answer to that question is "same thing as you, man,"
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rick sumner
Trad climber
reno, nevada/ wasilla alaska
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I bet you still get the pleasure of paying property taxes 365 days a year, eh Johnny? Got anything to climb down that way? Trade you a bag of apples for a route next week.
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TradEddie
Trad climber
Philadelphia, PA
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It says nothing there about camping in a tent!
I've no idea whether that means tents are prohibited or allowed, but if you're in a tent, or sleeping in the open air (like the cows do), that regulation couldn't possibly apply.
TE
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Jon Beck
Trad climber
Oceanside
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johnyrig - sounds like you got seduced by the cheap price of a big chunk of land. I think the moral of the story is to do your homework. There are lots of cheap pieces of land, even here in expensive San Diego county, usually cheap for a reason. Access and zoning being the biggies.
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doughnutnational
Gym climber
its nice here in the spring
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Put in a spring box and a pipe to a trough and your fencing project might be minimal.
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hashbro
Trad climber
Mental Physics........
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Sep 18, 2014 - 12:12am PT
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http://www.sacbee.com/2014/09/14/6700088/spencer-lennard-subsidies-turn.html
Subsidies turn Emigrant Wilderness into grazing nightmare
By Spencer Lennard
Special to The Bee
Published: Sunday, Sep. 14, 2014 - 12:00 am
Several friends and I recently embarked on what we hoped would be a wilderness adventure in California’s high country. What we found was nothing like that.
When we picked up the wilderness permit for our hike in the Emigrant Wilderness in the Stanislaus National Forest, we envisioned the Sierra high country to be wonderful fish and wildlife habitat lined with huge, picturesque ponderosa pines and white granite cliffs. The otherwise helpful rangers made no mention of the ecosystem wreckage we were about to encounter.
Instead of the pristine trout creek we expected, the otherwise spectacular Kennedy Creek was lined with thousands of steaming piles of cow dung, swarms of black flies, cow-trampled banks and waterways and green algae-filled water. Instead of what should have been lush, wildflower-strewn meadows at Kennedy Lake, we sunk into a green quagmire of muck created by a steady stream of cows cooling themselves in the shallows.
As we scurried to get above the algae-clogged Kennedy Lake, we encountered several fly fishers, horse packers, photographers and hikers – all aghast and expressing the same sense of disappointment as we were. Why would the National Forest Service and the California legislative delegation continue the taxpayer-subsidized damage to some of the state’s best sub-alpine habitat, especially here, in this increasingly popular recreational area?
As we swatted flies and stepped over the excrement, we were struck by the notion that this hiker’s paradise should not be a taxpayer-subsidized feedlot. We understood that grazing allotments were grandfathered into many wilderness bills – obviously including the Emigrant Wilderness – when they were designated as such. We know that policy change is slower than molasses, especially when ranching culture and environmental issues are being discussed. But we could not understand how the U.S. Forest Service and California’s blue congressional delegation could let such taxpayer-subsidized harm continue to degrade one of our most preciously beautiful places, especially when species and habitat loss are also at stake.
Holding our noses from the stench of urine and feces, we asked ourselves, “Why is this occurring in our diminishing wilderness, some of the best fish and wildlife habitat left in the Sierra?”
According to the National Public Lands Grazing Campaign, grazing programs operated by the U.S. Forest Service and the Bureau of Land Management receive an annual taxpayer subsidy of almost $445 million to facilitate a program that doesn’t benefit the public, wildlife or the land. This defacement of our national treasures is occurring just so a few ranchers can cash in their welfare checks.
Private, unirrigated rangeland in the West rents for an average of $11.90 per cow and calf, while monthly grazing fees on federal lands are currently a paltry $1.35. Despite the extreme damage done, western federal rangelands account for less than 3 percent of all forage fed to livestock in the United States. If all livestock were removed from public lands in the West, beef prices would be unaffected.
Cattle destroy native vegetation, damage soils and stream banks, and contaminate waterways with fecal waste. After decades of livestock grazing, once-lush streams and riparian forests have been reduced to flat, dry wastelands; once-rich topsoil has been turned to dust, causing soil erosion, stream sedimentation and wholesale elimination of some aquatic habitats. The now cow-trodden ecosystem has been robbed of its natural function, as is painfully evident on the landscape.
Keystone predators like the grizzly bear and wolf were driven to near extinction in western ecosystems by “predator control” programs designed to protect the livestock industry. Adding insult to injury – and flying in the face of modern conservation science – the livestock industry remains the leading stodgy opponent to otherwise popular efforts to reintroduce species like the Mexican gray wolf in Arizona and New Mexico.
It is clear that the true cost of this archaic land mismanagement is also risking harm to the human communities below. The federal grazing program actually harms the local economy in favor of a few ranchers. Recreationists like us will NOT return to the Kennedy Lake drainage till the cows are removed. We’ll warn our friends and they’ll tell theirs. The depressed foothill towns of Sonora, Twain Harte and Columbia will receive far less revenue from hikers, horse packers and fishers if no effort is made to reclaim our public wilderness from the cows.
I am hopeful that precious wilderness like the Emigrant will soon be appreciated for its scenic, ecological and spiritual values instead of the pittance grazing provides for a few.
Spencer Lennard is an avid hiker, mountaineer and public lands advocate who lives in Oregon.
Read more here: http://www.sacbee.com/2014/09/14/6700088/spencer-lennard-subsidies-turn.html#storylink=cpy
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hashbro
Trad climber
Mental Physics........
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Sep 18, 2014 - 12:17am PT
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September 08, 2014
Share on facebook Share on twitter Share on google More Sharing Services 46
Buying Out A Swindle
Wild West Welfare
by WILLIAM WILLERS
“The western cattle industry has been riding the backs of taxpayers for nearly seventy years”
–T.H. Watkins, 2002
Few have profited more or longer off of American taxpayers than livestock operators who graze the public lands of the American West. Tens of thousands of square miles there have, for more than three quarters of a century, been managed essentially as grazing estates for a small minority of “permittees” – individuals or corporations holding federal grazing permits.
The scheme dates back to the Taylor Grazing Act of 1934 when the U.S. Bureau of Land Management (BLM, known at the time as the Grazing Service) placed millions of acres into “grazing allotments”. Over ensuing generations politics influenced regulations, so that permittees pay a trivial fraction of market demand. Laws typically mandate that allotments be grazed, so that if someone were to acquire a permit with the idea of protecting the land by removing domestic livestock, the permit would have to be transferred to an interest that would continue grazing.
The standard unit of measure is an “animal unit per month (AUM) – a cow plus calf or 5 sheep. To graze livestock on private land today in Montana costs $21 per AUM, but permittees pay $1.35, an imbalance typical for the public lands throughout the West. The difference, money due taxpayers, marks a unique welfare system carefully kept away from public awareness. This is not a petty issue. The BLM alone has 155 million acres in grazing allotments, and the U.S. Forest Service grazes another 95 million acres of national forest land. Together, it amounts to 8% of the contiguous United States, an area that, if seen as a square, would be 625 miles on a side – equal in extent to Montana, Wyoming and both Dakotas combined.
It is a bitter irony that the corporate world and its congressional agents, intent on killing governmental regulations so that their imaginary “free market” can go forth unhindered, protect public land welfare ranchers at taxpayer expense. If a free market is truly central to conservative philosophy, should not conservative legislators be working to guarantee that We The People get paid what the free market demands for use of our public lands, instead of a pittance?
Permits are simply 10-year leases subject to termination, and permittees lease nothing but grazing rights. Permits do not convey any property rights, and permittees are not due any compensation should permits be terminated or reduced. But for generations permits have been renewed automatically without question so that permittees, such as Cliven Bundy of recent fame, have come to think of public land they graze as a kind of personal property. So ingrained is the assumption that the welfare will be permanent that ranches have been sold as if public lands under permit were a fixed part of the ranch itself, and it is not uncommon for US citizens to be run off of their own public land by permittees, sometimes at gunpoint.
The situation has become even more senseless in the last 25 years or so, in that permittees are being paid lavish sums to “sell” their grazing permits (which, understand, they never owned in the first place) where grazing is especially damaging, where there are efforts to protect wilderness values, or, amazingly, if a permittee simply wants to retire. Permits funded by taxpayers and meant only as a privilege subject to termination, can now be “bought out”, which amounts to a double jackpot for permittees.
A startling example of the practice was an 850,000-acre buyout in 2004, in Utah-Arizona, with grazing allotments in both BLM and national forest lands, for which the seller received a whopping $4.5 million. The buyers, the Grand Canyon Trust and the Conservation Fund, are major promoters of the buyout philosophy that, ironically, is being called “free-market environmentalism”, a startling misnomer in that it rewards a blatant welfare system.
An email earlier this year to one of the trusts involved in that exchange was answered with “Permits were assumed as part of the acquisition of the ranch – meaning, the Trust did not buy-out the permits, but continues to operate under those permits.” Whoa! “The Ranch” the seller actually owned was only 1000 acres, and one is supposed to believe that 1000 acres of desert is what $4.5 million was paid for … and, oh, by the way, permits for 850,000 acres (1300 square miles) were incidental, so, technically, it was not a buyout? Please! The purchase was obviously for access to the permits. But even though the allotments are now under the control of those conservation organizations, the land must nevertheless be managed for grazing, as the law demands. The only difference, presumably, is that the new permittees will treat the land differently.
If the goal of this “technically not a buyout” buyout was to manage grazing on public land allotments in a more environmentally appropriate way … which naturally suggests it was not being managed well by the original permittee (who is now $4.5 million richer) … why, logical citizen-owners of public land might ask, were the BLM and Forest Service not enforcing a gentler treatment of the public’s land with the previous permittee?
More recently, an April 22, 2014 Wall Street Journal article described an Arizona rancher who had been “having difficulties with hikers and other land users on the allotment” [i.e., citizen owners of the land], receiving several hundred thousand dollars in 2003 from the Conservation Fund in exchange for his permit to graze 44,000 acres of public land. This the Journal reported as a positive outcome: “No violence, no protesters, no armed federal agents – just a check and a contract.” In other words, if U.S. citizens don’t want trouble from permittees they have been supporting financially for generations, they need to understand that these welfare ranchers, many extremely wealthy, expect to be paid yet more. To add to the insanity of it all, many permittees who have benefited for so long from governmental/taxpayer largesse, nevertheless despise “Big Government”.
The BLM, and the U.S. Forest Service are under no legal obligation to renew permits and could simply terminate them, but, as explained to me in less than great depth, “They just don’t”. As to why not, “Permittees don’t want their permits revoked”. Well, why would they? Living large off of taxpayers is a hell of a great deal, and permittees have wielded such political clout that western congressional representatives protect them. The whole setup simply reeks of rot.
Political clout extends into many western environmental organizations. George Wuerthner, who once worked for the Greater Yellowstone Coalition, wrote in a recent issue of The Wildlife News that “GYC expressly forbade me to discuss livestock production’s contribution to the issues that the organization was highlighting; ….. [W]hen I was asked to discuss the threats to the ecosystem at the organization’s annual board meeting, I was not allowed to mention livestock production even though many of the issues the group was fighting could be traced back to ranching as the ultimate source of the environmental problem. Whether it was dewatering of rivers for irrigation and its detrimental impacts of fisheries, to the spread of disease from domestic sheep to wild bighorn sheep, from the killing of bison that wandered from Yellowstone Park to opposition to wolf recovery to the continued policy of elk feed grounds in Wyoming, the ultimate source of the problem was and is livestock. However, GYC was unwilling to frame the issue that way for fear of antagonizing its board and/or regional politicians.”
Livestock grazing is a major function of some governmental bureaus, particularly of the BLM, so that any reduction of the livestock program would naturally undercut the bureaucratic need to self-perpetuate. In order to promote public lands grazing, the BLM relies heavily on proclaiming its role in maintaining a lifestyle, seemingly as if it were the Bureau’s patriotic imperative: “Livestock grazing on public lands … provides livestock-based economic opportunities … while contributing to the West’s, and America’s, social fabric and identity … and help preserve the character of the rural West.” The “system” is absolutely absurd, and few citizens are aware of its immense magnitude, the degree to which it has become firmly rooted, and the level at which they, as taxpayers, are being “fleeced”
By now, permits for millions of acres of grazing allotments have been assumed by conservation organizations that are nevertheless obliged by law to continue livestock grazing, which they attempt to do at the lowest level allowable and in hopes that there will someday emerge federal legislation that might end livestock grazing on public land altogether. This is costing millions of private-sector dollars from foundations, from corporate and citizen donations, and from what other “deep pockets” are willing to pay up. By rights, though, none of this should be necessary, given that permits were created as temporary grazing privileges.
When one tries to fit all aspects together, what emerges is a logically indefensible, covert setup involving wealthy permittees, protective legislators and governmental bureaucrats, and the result is a $500,000,000-one billion dollar per year taxpayer victimization and the ongoing degradation of a fragile, arid environment for which domestic livestock are biologically unsuited. It is a scenario so firmly in place that the bulk of the environmental community, by paying for control of permits, and by lobbying for buyout legislation, has simply caved in to the rotten political state of affairs.
The best single source of information for this issue is the National Public Lands Grazing Campaign, foremost advocate for a federal buyout program that would pay permittees $175 per AUM to retire permits. On the left side of their website are internal links to all relevant data and arguments, as well as their admission that, to use their own words, “politically, we do not have the option to simply stop paying for the federal grazing program.” Politically!
Advocates for the buyout strategy admit that it is “morally repugnant to reward resource abuse by paying to retire permit/leases”, but because they understand that domestic livestock has “done more damage to North America than the bulldozer and chainsaw combined” they have made the conscious decision to yield to the corrupt industrial/political/bureaucratic gridlock by paying the public’s way out of the mess. “While a long and glorious [sic], principled fight to end public lands livestock grazing through litigation and attrition may succeed in the end”, they write, “many species, ecosystems and watersheds already on the brink could not tolerate further livestock grazing over the time required to win on principle alone.”
Directors and lawyers for environmental organizations buying control of permits, and those lobbying for federal buyout legislation, are loathe to speak about details of their strategy, because it reveals the degree to which they have yielded to what they understand is “morally repugnant”. It makes any discussion that adheres to logic and the public interest very difficult. All things considered, the concept of buying out grazing permits, however accomplished, is a complete surrender by people who see no other path available toward ending a destructive governmental-industrial swindle of the Nation’s citizens.
William Willers is emeritus professor of biology, University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh now living in Middleton, WI. He is founder of Superior Wilderness Action Network (SWAN) and editor of Learning to Listen to the Land and Unmanaged Landscapes, both from Island Press.
http://www.counterpunch.org/2014/09/08/wild-west-welfare/
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survival
Big Wall climber
Terrapin Station
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Sep 18, 2014 - 06:58am PT
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I wonder how ol' Cliven the welfare moocher freedom fighter is doing anyway?
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