Armed group occupying refuge clash with environmentalists

[L. Coyote]

37. On the Firing Line: Bullies in Stetsons

Good article.

On the Firing Line: Bullies in Stetsons
by Jeffrey St. Clair - James Ridgeway January 15, 2016

Scanning the Sunday New York Times during the summer of 1990, President George Herbert Walker Bush read how an Idaho rancher had threatened to slit the throat of Forest Service ranger Don Oman, who had decided to reduce the number of cattle grazing on several allotments in the Twin Falls District of the Sawtooth National Forest. Bush ordered a Justice Department investigation. A White House aide called Oman and said the president wanted the ranger to know he wouldn’t tolerate harassment of federal workers. ......

.....The heightened animosity toward the federal government in the West stemmed, in part, from the increasingly powerful property-rights movement, sometimes generically referred to as the “Wise Use” movement, consisting of a commingling of corporations, small businesses and landowners who argued that businesses should be compensated for any reductions in the commercial uses of public lands caused by the enforcement of environmental regulations.

On the further fringe of the property rights fight resides a much smaller but vocal group of people who think that the federal system of public lands (national forests and grasslands, national parks and wildlife refuges and BLM lands) are a constitutional fraud and rightly belong to the states and counties. These people tend to view federal workers who oversee public land policy as trespassers on their property. ...........

bit.ly/1OnXPz9 #OregonUnderAttack