Truth is clearly overrated among our kind (6)

After the last tree is felled, Christ will come back.

(James G. Watt, Interior Secretary under President Ronald Reagan)

The white men were roused by a mere instinct of self-preservation—until at last there had sprung into existence a great Ku Klux Klan, a veritable empire of the South, to protect the Southern country.

(President Woodrow Wilson, 1913-1921)

A bunch of cowboys camping

(Michele Fiore, Nevada Assemblywoman, and self-appointed defender of white terrorists who occupied Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in Oregon)

The short explanation continued

D. It's called the Wise Use doctrine (mentioned in “The problem with America is...”) and has been around for some 30 years. It's anything but “wise.” It is part and parcel of Libertarian philosophy. The central tenant is that private ownership is always better than public ownership.

The white terrorists who occupied the Malheur Refuge claimed that they believed in the Wise Use doctrine. The livestock industry, oil and gas and various developers will often profess to be supporters of Wise Use, but it would not be overly cynical to think that philosophical doctrine is not what guides many of these bottom feeders.

For the Wise Use true believer, land is worth only what people will pay for it. If you can't make a buck in some way it has no value. The private market by its very nature exists to commodify natural resources and turn them into consumer goods. Most important, it attempts to externalize expenses.

By some estimates, if the world's largest corporations were actually responsible for their costs of pollution and other damages to the environment, something like one-third of their profits would disappear. Another study estimated that the combined world damage to the environment in 2008 was something like $22 trillion!

Land management in the U.S. is important and in need of intelligent changes and modifications that reflects a 21^st century reality, but the Wise Use movement is largely another dreary American hustle that has the stench of the 19^th century and the Gilded Age. A number of years ago I wrote a series of articles about one of America's best scams, entitled America's Turf Terror (I). Time to put a stake in the heart of the Wise Use scam.

E. Even though meat consumption in the United States has decreased, it is increasing in the developing world because of rising standards of living. It has been devastating to the planet's rainforests and wildlife.

If one were to take the agricultural business in general in the U.S., billions of dollars is subsidies go exclusively to corn, soybeans, wheat, rice, much of which ends up feeding animals. Western ranchers are one of the largest recipients of federal welfare programs. Something like $500 million in taxpayer money in 2014 went to ranchers getting below-market value leases to graze their cattle on public lands.

F. The Ammon Bundy gang that occupied the Oregon wildlife sanctuary this past January could end up costing the taxpayers several millions of dollars. These ignorant thugs, as we've learned, desecrated sacred Native American sites at Malheur, built roads through Paiute Indian grounds, and trenches dug adjacent to sacred ground contained human feces. So much for the professed respect.

Cliven Bundy, the patriarch of this family, whose ranch in Nevada adjoins thousands of acres of public lands, allows his cattle to graze wherever they wish. He lets them run wild until he decides to trap and kill one. He apparently does not vaccinate or treat his cattle for disease and seemingly does not manage or control breeding. Yup, we'll let Cliven Bundy be the poster child for privatization and welfare capitalism.

Oh yes, not discussed is the progress that could be lost between ranchers and environmentalists because of the occupation, possible revenue and job losses to the county and, last, the wildlife itself. The many birds arrive in the spring to breed. Much work still remains to be done in preparation for their arrival.

Which way to the Emerald City

Prohibition in the 1920s was probably one of the worst examples of public policy that the country ever implemented. But, like today, America was undergoing huge changes.

The W.A.S.P. establishment was losing political power, people were moving to urban areas, immigrants were becoming citizens, African-Americans were going north looking for a better life, women had the vote, and a great many Americans were simply frightened and angry at the speed of these changes.

A backlash occurred. The membership of the Ku Klux Klan grew enormously, especially in the north, religious fundamentalism attempted to push back against science and evolution and politicians railed against the “other.” “I want my country back,” and “it's the government's fault” were heard in the 1920s as well.

Yes, we Americans are mad at the present time, even if in some cases we can't actually explain who or what we're mad at. For many Americans, especially a large segment of white America, there is a sense that they've been duped and manipulated for generations. Well, they have. So what's the strategy?

Sell a country! Why not sell the air, the great sea, as well as the earth?

(Tecumseh, 1768-1813, Shawnee)

TO BE CONTINUED

Additional

https://farm.ewg.org/ Farm Subsidity Data

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/mar/07/donald-trump-why-americans-support  The anger supporting Donald Trump, by Thomas Frank

http://www.cnn.com/2016/01/03/opinions/kayyem-oregon-building-takeover-terrorism/  Yes they are actual terrorists

NO JOB

Truth is clearly overrated among our kind (1)

Orcs hate Elves with a passion.

(from Lord of the Rings by J. R.R. Tolkien)

“Home home on the range, where the deer and the antelope play”

According to the Center for Biological Diversity, Wildlife Services, part of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, has killed, through gassing, poisoning and strangulation by snare, 27 million native animals since 1996, including more than 1 million in 2014. The animals have included prairie dogs, gray wolves, mountain lions, black bears, foxes, coyotes and even bald eagles, and possibly a few domestic cats.

The mission of the USDA APHIS (Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service) Wildlife Services “is to provide Federal leadership and expertise to resolve wildlife conflicts to allow people and wildlife to coexist.” The WS is a government agency, its programs paid for by the taxpayers and supposedly answerable to all the citizens.

Yet most people, including the politicians responsible for oversight, have little understanding of the seemingly secret activities of this agency. What are the causes for each killing? Why is there a large variation from one year to the next? Is it merely a perception of a threat offered up by a farmer or rancher that causes the WS to kill wildlife? What role does corporate agriculture in general have in setting the “killing” priorities ... or, is it merely part of something much more corrupt and ultimately harmful to all of us?

Piling up the cow manure

In 1885 William A.J. Sparks, commissioner of the General Land Office, in his report to Congress, said

that “unscrupulous speculation resulted in the worst forms of land monopoly … throughout regions dominated by cattle-raising interests.” It has been said often enough that it's more than likely that land in the western states was acquired originally by assorted types of fraud.

The swindle, updated for the 21^st century and more efficient, is still a swindle, with the possible consequences far worse today and affecting those that have never seen a real cow.

When a character like Cliven Bundy and his fellow travelers, the very essence of “welfare parasites,” state they will not pay a grazing fee for their cattle, keep in mind that the taxpayers of the United States are providing millions of dollars in indirect subsidies for private land ranchers. The actual federal grazing fee is approximately $1.35 a month per cow-calf pair in 2015, but the market rate on private land averages around $12.00.

One of the more colorful quotations comes from Brian Ertz, chairperson of Sierra Club's National Grazing Team, who said in 2014 in reference to an area on the Idaho-Nevada border: “One of the most cattle-fucked landscapes you'll ever see.”

Actual climate science tells us that one of the main contributors of greenhouse gases comes from meat production. It's also in the realm of possibility that the butchering of wildlife brought to you by the Wildlife Services has been decided by the livestock industry.

Today, desertification, pollution of water, destruction of cover for birds and mammals, mono-culturing of grasslands, deforestation and the destruction of native plants comes to us through poorly regulated grazing. In 1934 in congressional testimony the Forest Service referred to “ cancer-like growth” because of unregulated grazing. More than 70 years later we're still dealing with cancer-like growth and it's not because we don't understand the science today.

In 1946 The Bureau of Land Management (BLM) was created, a merger between Grazing Service and the General Land Office. Today it administers more than 247 million acres of public lands, mostly located in the western states. The BLM has sometimes been referred to, with a touch of bitterness, as the Bureau of Livestock and Mines. The question of course is who exactly does the BLM really work for. TO BE CONTINUED

Emancipating the American serf

The whole world is festering with unhappy souls

(from 'The Merry Minuet,' sung by Kingston Trio 1959)

Maskirovka

Loosely translated, the word “maskirovka” means masked warfare. It could refer to Putin's use of local thugs, volunteers and disguised Russian Special Operations troops in eastern Ukraine to destabilize the region, thus avoiding the use of traditional forces crossing the border as an invading army.

Of course, we Americans know quite a bit about “special operations” across the globe; however, we know a good deal less about masked warfare inside our own country, partly because we're largely unaware of what is is but, more importantly, the idea is not to know it's actually happening. There are no men dressed in uniforms carrying automatic weapons and speaking in halting English. But our own unique masked warfare has been going on for a very long time, from the very beginning of the republic actually.

The men the American people admire most extravagantly are the most daring liars; the men they detest most violently are those who try to tell them the truth

(H.L. Mencken)

It's all mine

The confirmations continue to pile up on the expanding dung heap. Following rapidly on the heels of Thomas Piketty's “best seller” Capital in the Twenty-First Century (see previous article), detailing the level of American inequality, we now have Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens (see Additional Reading below).

Getting beyond the political science jargon and supporting data, all of which is revealing, the report pretty much demonstrates that the overwhelming majority of the American public has very little influence regarding the policies our government adopts. The full report will be available in the Fall.

Freedom in capitalist society always remains about the same as it was in ancient Greek republics: Freedom for slave owners

(Vladimir Lenin)

The sound of black helicopters

Special operations at its very best are good at deliberate misdirection, pitting various groups against one another, stirring up old fears and superstitions, manipulating ignorance, creating new historical “facts,” which oftentimes includes nostalgic myths about the "good old days." The final act of the very best special operations is instilling fear in the dominant culture, be it at the local level or even throughout a nation-state. “My god, 'they' might take it from us.”

Picking on white America

There's something to be said for a national upheaval, even revolution in some cases. It can clear out the accumulated rot and fanciful misconceptions, as well as rid the nation of a corrupt and useless status quo. But, there is also a downside. In the U.S. in the 1930s it took a worldwide economic Depression and an extraordinary political leader like Franklin D. Roosevelt to create serious political, economic and social change.

In Europe the same Depression led to Fascism and WWII.. The 1918 Bolshevik revolution in Russia, by the 1930s, had turned into a reign of terror and the leadership of the sociopath Joseph Stalin. The world is full of similar dismal examples.

White America has been fortunate, in that it has not had a foreign army in its country since the British invaded the U.S. in the War of 1812. The same certainly can not be said of the Indian nation occupying the same territory as European-Americans but for a longer period of time. As for African-Americans, well, they were considered property until the 1860s and were subjected to second class citizenship until well into the 20^th century. No, the American Civil War was not about state rights.

Louis Hartz, in his classic The Liberal Tradition in America, said in the mid-1950s, “that instead of recapturing our past, we have got to transcend it. As for a child leaving adolescence, there is no going home again for America.”

Your 'people', sir, is nothing but a great beast

(Alexander Hamilton, June 18, 1787, Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia)

Our Founding Fathers, while an extraordinary group of men, were not gods from Mount Olympus, and they certainly never put “democracy” on some elevated platform as we tend to do today. They were, understandably, fearful of excessive concentration of power. For our Founders, democracy meant preventing “mob rule and the triumph of passion over reason to serve the ambition of the demagogue.” They created a government which ended up over time serving the needs of the status quo. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg in a television interview during a visit to Egypt said, “I would not look to the United States Constitution if I were drafting a constitution in the year 2012.”

I see in the near future a crisis approaching that unnerves me and causes me to tremble for the safety of my country.... Corporations have been enthroned and an era of corruption in high places will follow....

(Abraham Lincoln, 1864)

Had Lincoln not been assassinated, might the history of the United States been far different? Historians will likely be debating this question for years to come. Regardless, white America did not choose the high ground after Lincoln was killed. Four million former slaves were emancipated in 1865. At the same time some 8 million whites, largely illiterate, never owned slaves, but ended up regarding the freed African-Americans as competitors. The whites were easily manipulated, usually by the same people that were in control before the Civil War. By 1874 the white power structure had regained control and the former Confederacy descended into a “heart of darkness.”

The death of Sitting Bull removes one of the obstacles to civilization. He was a greasy savage, who rarely bathed and was liable at anytime to become infected with vermin. During the whole of his life he entertained the remarkable delusion that he was a free-born American with some rights in the country of his ancestors

(St. Louis Republic newspaper, December 17, 1890)

Abraham Lincoln wanted the West opened for all Americans after the Civil War ended and for the average American to own some land and be a citizen and a full participant in a democratic country. Well, once again white America did not choose the high ground. The opening of the West became the on-going story of genocide, violence, environmental destruction, class warfare and corporate predation and corruption. (For an excellent understanding of the role of the railroads in the West and the rise of the Gilded Age in the late 19^th century, read Railroaded by Richard White.)

Wealth, as Mr. Hobbes says, is power

(Adam Smith)

Cow billy liberty, freedom and farmer Bundy

Today, in 2014, mythical American exceptionalism is all pervasive, reinforced by info-entertainers on cable news, politicians, corporations and certainly the many oligarchs with their own anti-democratic agenda. We Americans are somehow special and different we are advised and, if truth be told, a little better than all the rest. The glow, however, is wearing off the glorious fable, rather quickly. But remember what masked warfare is all about.

Cliven Bundy, a millionaire cattle rancher in Nevada may be an apt metaphor for a certain delusional albeit influential segment of America, wallowing in white entitlement and demanding its proprietary welfare capitalism in perpetuity.

Farmer Bundy has been grazing his cattle on “public” lands and has not paid the range fee, hardly onerous by any rational standard, to the Bureau of Land Management in some twenty years, which clearly begs the question: What the hell has the BLM been doing all this time?

Part of the land that Bundy grazes his cattle on has been reserved for the endangered desert tortoise. The land does not belong to Cliven but is held in trust for all Americans, thanks to the intelligence and foresight of the Republican president Theodore Roosevelt at the turn of the 20^th century. Supposedly the fee Mr. Bundy now owes to the citizens of the United States is approximately a million dollars.

Recently, like a tired cowboy fable, when the BLM decided it was about time to enforce the law and round up Bundy's cattle, this odious freeloader claimed he didn't “recognize” the Federal government and started yapping on cue about his freedom and liberty, which naturally brought out the various “patriot” groups and the lunatic militia movement, who were armed to the teeth and threatened violence against BLM officials. This dreary “range war”story is not yet over.

A judicious hanging in Wall Street would be a good measure with which to begin the reformation

(Ignatius Donnelly, in The Representative, August 29, 1894)

No fairy tales to believe in anymore

The population of the United States is over 300 million people. The total number of eligible voters is approximately 206 million people. The number of registered voters in the U.S. are approximately 169 million, with some 86 million registered Democrats, 55 million registered Republicans and some 28 million falling into various categories. Now consider one to five percent of the population.


Oligarchy, for all practical purposes, is the government we now have in the United States. Masked warfare has been quite successful. The obvious question is what will be done about it? Who will do it?
How many people constitute a serious movement with the discipline, the knowledge and the ability to sweep out the accumulated rot and toss out a corrupt and useless status quo? There will be in the near future no national uprising, no college students successfully confronting para-military police forces on a part-time basis, and most definitely no “glorious” revolution. It will, however, not be pain free.


Five percent of 86 million registered Democrats is some 4 million people; three percent of 169 million registered voters is 5 million people; two percent of 300 million residents of the U.S. is 6 million people. The numbers are there.


Credit must be given where credit is due. The current Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, John Roberts, and his majority of reactionaries could be dressed in top hats and tails and sent back to the late 19^th century. They'd fit right in. Antonin Scalia could ponder his doctrine of “original intent” until the cows come home.


From voting rights to unlimited money in politics, the Roberts court has done its duty well. It was a television comedian that said of the Chief Justice that he was either a liar or too naïve to be serving on the highest court in the land, if he believed that large sums of money did not corrupt the political system.


The U.S. Congress, a corrupt, pompous debating society for millionaires, is merely irrelevant. The Executive branch—who knows? Certainly having a political system allowing for a wider pool of talent to run for the presidency would be a good beginning.


Our 18^th century Constitution, a remarkable document for its time, is now a relic of a distant past and needs to be rewritten for the 21^st century.


Who will rid this country of the oligarchs?

Additional Reading:

Testing Theories of AmericaPolitics

C.E.O. Pay Goes Up, Up and Away!

Gap Between Executive Pay andWorkers Wages Continues to Grow

Are Corporations Really HoggingWorkers Wages?

America the Voiceless: Voters Can'tCompete With Big Campaign Cash

America's Mad Dash Toward Oligarchy(video)