We May Be About to Witness One of the Great Privatizations of America's Public Lands

[Ferd Berfel]

http://www.alternet.org/environment/public-land-america-might-be-about-go-private

How the raid on Malheur screened a future raid on real estate.

It goes without saying that in a democracy everyone is entitled to his or her own opinions. The trouble starts when people think they are also entitled to their own facts.

Away out West, on the hundreds of millions of acres of public lands that most Americans take for granted (if they are aware of them at all), the trouble is deep, widespread, and won’t soon go away. Last winter’s armed take-over and 41-day occupation of Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in southeastern Oregon is a case in point. It was carried out by people who, if they hadn’t been white and dressed as cowboys, might have been called “terrorists” and treated as such. Their interpretation of the history of western lands and of the judicial basis for federal land ownership—or at least that of their leaders, since they weren’t exactly a band of intellectuals—was only loosely linked to reality.

At least some of them took inspiration from the notion that Jesus Christ wrote the Constitution (which would be news to the Deists, like James Madison, who were its actual authors) and that it prohibits federal ownership of any land excepting administrative sites within the United States—a contention that more than two centuries of American jurisprudence has emphatically repudiated.

The troubling thing is that similar delusions infect pockets of unrest throughout the West, lending a kind of twisted legitimacy to efforts at both the state and national level to transfer western public lands to states and counties. To be sure, not all the proponents of this liquidation of America’s national patrimony subscribe to wing-nut doctrines; sometimes they just use them.

[blm]

1. ALEC has been setting this up for many years

.

[Ferd Berfel]

2. given some of the 'conversations' I've had here

ALEC will get help form CLinton and her crowd.

[blm]

3. Baloney - you're in the wrong forum for that reply.

And I say that as a longtime Dem who also voted for Sanders, but, know well the very real differences between Dem policies and GOP policies.

try out your act on someone else

[Ferd Berfel]

4. It's all connected

You will find a llot of Fracking support from camp weathervane here

The privatization is coming from the Politics. It's all connected

[blm]

5. I know the difference, and I know discernment…..

and I know when someone chooses to ignore accuracy in favor of polemics.

[Eleanors38]

6. Hunters and fishers are allies to prevent this. Are they Our allies?

[Brickbat]

9. Excellent point.

[sorefeet]

7. One right wing creep is running for

Governor of Montana, Gianforte (giantfart) and he wants to privatize all the BLM and parks like Yellowstone. He is also a Mormon billionaire who thinks earth is 6000 years old. The wackos are literally trying to pull a hostile takeover of the West.

[felix_numinous]

8. Public lands

are being sold off to the highest bidder. Malheur squatters were useful idiots to ridicule against anyone fighting it.