Paul Thomas Richards OBAMA TO AMERICA’S AT-RISK SPECIES:
“DROP DEAD!”
On Thursday, February 23, 2012, the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the U.S. Forest Service finalized rules governing management of 191-to-193 million acres of National Forests and Grasslands.
President Barack Obama is now removing these indigenous species mandates and all language that protects habitats for viable populations of indigenous wildlife; even species on the brink of annihilation.
Advocates for biological diversity see this as a potentially-fatal blow to the National Forest System. John M. Fitzgerald, a Washington, D.C. lawyer and also policy director for the Society for Conservation Biology, told me: “By subtracting living parts of the forest, they now threaten to kill the entire forest. A living forest without its living plants and animals is not a forest–It’s just a stand of timber.”
With indigenous species mandates, at least some National Forests’ critical habitats are protected or restored.
Absent indigenous species mandates, Americans will lose the complex webs of lives and habitats for at-risk species throughout our entire National Forest System. Particularly egregious, Obama’s February 23 rules likely spell the end of the beloved Northern Rockies Ecosystem; comprised of Idaho, Montana, northwestern Wyoming, eastern Oregon, and eastern Washington—The LAST functioning ecosystem, with all its native species, remaining in the lower 49 states.
Instead of protecting at-risk species, Obama wants National Forest supervisors to determine to what extent “their” National Forests will provide habitats for whatever species they choose. Science, public information, and public participation will play no meaningful role. All key decisions regarding indigenous species’ habitats upon National Forests will be strictly consigned to local politics, influences, and distractions.
Obama’s decision severely compromises survival of at-risk indigenous species, biological diversity, and restoration of ecological health to our nation’s public lands Legacy, already damaged by decade after decade of government subsidies for: Corporate clear-cutting and over-cutting; open pit mining with toxic tailings; surface and subsurface water degradation; and other dangerous exploitations; all with no accompanying stewardship concerns for long-term health or mere viability of vital public forests.
By removing all protections, Obama now officially endorses painstaking, polarizing, and paralyzing forest-by-forest/supervisor-by-supervisor/new-personnel-by-new-personnel/species-by-species impervious and incomprehensible processes dictated by resource extractors, their money, their lawyers, and their lobbyists.
Public lands stakeholders—Americans who live outside local National Forest jurisdictions and politics—will be disenfranchised from their rights to involvement, concerning future industrial development of their own National Forests and resultant exterminations of their own wildlife.
If he stays dead-on towards this totally-avoidable catastrophe, March 5, 2012, will be noted worldwide as the day Obama dramatically renounced the 1992 Convention on Biological Diversity, signed by 193 countries, with the United States defiantly joining the Vatican, Andorra, and South Sudan as the only holdouts.
The Forest Service’s indigenous species mandates for all U.S. National Forests and the 1992 Convention on Biological Diversity were designed to provide necessary flexibility regarding irreconcilable dualism between endangered species protections and no protections at all.
But, beginning March 5, 2012, instead of serving as critical patches of biological diversity providing extremely unique and irreplaceable DNA and the “seed stock” so desperately required for restoration; our National Forests will be exposed to full-scale resource extraction (taxpayer-subsidized roading, logging, mining, oil and gas drilling, fracking, and other industrial development); continued deterioration of critical habitats; penultimate species’ extinctions; radically-diminished National Forest opportunities for all Americans; and permanent, irretrievable loss of sentient beings four billion years in the making.
© 2012, Paul Thomas Richards
Editor’s Notes:
1. This article is dedicated to retired Deputy Regional Forester for the U.S. Forest Service, Bill Worf. A fearless proponent of biological diversity (“I shall not perish from this Earth without doing everything within my realm to save its most precious non-human resource.”), Worf worked for the Forest Service for 33 years after he returned home from World War II and then “retired” to found and administer Wilderness Watch.
Born July 29, 1926, on an eastern Montana homestead, Worf passed December 21, 2011, at his home in Missoula, Montana.
As a Marine, Worf fought in the fierce battles for Iwo Jima, forever immortalized by Joe Rosenthal’s iconic photograph of the raising of the U.S. flag on top of Mount Suribachi by five Marines and one Navy Corpsman. Worf was present at the original event and also its subsequent reenactment for Rosenthal.
For more details about of Worf’s exemplary life, CLICK HERE. Please send tax-deductible contributions in Worf’s honor to: Wilderness Watch Endowment Fund, P.O. Box 9175, Missoula, MT, 59807. Or, to: Worf Memorial Scholarship Fund, University of Montana Foundation, P.O. Box 7159, Missoula, MT, 59807. Thank you.
2. For in-depth information concerning this story, CLICK HERE, or go to: http://blogs.alternet.org/paulrichards/2010/05/11/restoring-indigenous-wildlife-species-to-all-national-forests-through-the-new-national-forest-system-planning-rule/ .
3. Americans’ other public lands management agency, the U.S. Department of Interior, has no rules encouraging or protecting indigenous species upon 264 million acres of Bureau of Land Management, or BLM, land; also collectively owned by the American people.
PTR Brief Bio:
A journalist with more than 44 years’ experience in Western politics and resource issues, Paul Thomas Richards has served as editor or co-editor of three newspapers, newsman and editor for The Associated Press, and elections manager for The AP, UPI, ABC, CBS, CNN, and NBC.
Richards founded and produced a successful radio news network; founded and hosted a political television interview program; founded and managed a news service for weekly newspapers; and authored a syndicated political column.
Richards owns a leading consulting firm for nonprofit organizations and Indigenous Peoples, PR Media Consultants®, Public Interest Media Since 1968™, near the community of Boulder, Mont.; and works as a professional researcher, writer, strategist, and editor.
Paul Thomas Richards SUPERCONGRESS–THE BEST AND THE BRIGHTEST,
CIRCA 21ST CENTURY:
“ACCIDENTAL DEMOCRAT” BAUCUS
RUNS THE PARTY AGROUND
AND BANKRUPTS THE COUNTRY
On June 7, 2001, as the Marine Corps Band played “Hail to the Chief,” President George W. Bush strutted into the White House East Room to sign the “Economic Growth and Tax Relief Reconciliation Act of 2001,” effectively robbing $1.35 trillion from governmental treasuries to hand out, reverse-Robin-Hood-style, to multimillionaires and billionaires.
The unelected president signed every letter in his name with a different pen, each given to key Congressional supporters as mementos. One of the first pens went to U.S. Sen. Max Baucus (Corporate D-Mont.), chairman of the Senate’s powerful Finance Committee, who betrayed his own party by carrying Republican tax cuts for the UltraRich through the Senate, then split 50-50. It was the proudest and most significant achievement in Baucus’ then-27-year Congressional career.
IF PHOTO DOES NOT APPEAR ON THIS PAGE, PLEASE: CLICK HERE.
President George W. Bush signing the “Economic Growth and Tax Relief Reconciliation Act of 2001” in the White House East Room, June 7, 2001.
U.S. Sen. Max Baucus (Corporate Democrat-Mont.), smiling, is at far right.
(“Public domain” photo courtesy of “Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States,” a service of the U.S. Government Printing Office)
“Every day it looks like a better and better decision,” Baucus said at the June 2001 White House ceremony, referring to the onslaught of class warfare that he, Bush, and Cheney had so successfully unleashed. “In many respects, I think, politically, I helped the party. We Democrats would have been in trouble in 2002 just saying ‘no’ to every one of the president’s proposals.”
Political observers cringed when Baucus, from a wealthy preeminent Republican family whose members heretofore had all run for state and federal offices as Republicans, claimed the Democratic Party as his own.
Never involved in the party before first attaining elected office, Baucus was an accidental Democrat at best, heeding advisors who bluntly told him he would not be elected to a state legislative seat in 1972 from Missoula, Montana’s most progressive city, unless he ran as a Democrat.
When the U.S. Supreme Court (zero percent jurisdiction over Florida’s state election laws) relied on John Ellis, George W. Bush’s cousin, paid by Fox (Faux) “News” to arbitrarily, but officially, “call” the election for Bush before votes had been counted; ordered the State of Florida (100 percent jurisdiction over Florida’s election law) to stop counting votes in the 2000 general election; forced the State of Florida to declare George W. Bush had somehow won in Florida, despite the wholesale absence of accurate vote tabulations; and then unConstitutionally appointed George W. Bush, the loser, as president, and Dick Cheney, the loser, as vice-president:
Most Americans hoped and prayed that, since Bush and Cheney were never elected, they would extend olive branches to Democrats, who held the evenly-divided Senate.
But, with Corporate Democrat Baucus–now the fourth most powerful person in Washington, D.C.–firmly in the Bush/Cheney camp, chopping Bush’s firewood, and carrying Bush’s tax subsidies for billionaires–those hopes were dashed.
“As President-elect (sic) Bush has made very clear, he ran on a particular platform that was very carefully developed,” said vice-president appointee Dick Cheney.
“It’s his program, it’s his agenda, and we have no intention at all of backing off of it. It’s why we got elected (sic). So, we’re going to aggressively pursue tax changes, tax reform, tax cuts, because it’s important to do so. The suggestion that somehow, because this was a close election, we should fundamentally change our beliefs; I just think is silly,” Cheney concluded.
As non-Baucus Democrats predicted, the Bush/Cheney/Baucus tax cuts eviscerated budget surpluses from the Clinton era, eliminated the entire $5.6 trillion surplus predicted for the next eight years, and burgeoned the federal deficit by 51 percent.
In early 2007, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office found tax rates for middle-income Americans climbed upwards in 2004, the most recent year for which data were available, while tax rates for higher-income Americans declined under the Bush/Baucus tax cuts.
“TOO BIG TO FAIL:”
With SO MANY massive taxpayer-funded “Bailouts” and “Subsidies”—ALL Paramountly Antithetical to “Free Market Capitalism”—so generously provided by low and middle income taxpayers to SO MANY “Too Big to Fail” Wall Street firms; bankers; insurers; inside traders; hedge funders; debt-to-equity leveragers; short-sellers; sub-prime mortgagers; GSE (“Government-Sponsored Enterprises,” such as “Fannie Mae” and “Freddie Mac” ) housing “bubblers” (bubble blowers and bubble bursters; sometimes in tandem, sometimes at each other’s throats); tax dodgers; collateralized-debt-obligation con artists; ill-informed boosters; speculating swindlers; corrupt loophole-creating lawyers and loophole-exploiting lobbyists; worthless “credit derivatives” promoters; toxic “assets” peddlers; default bettors; Ponzi schemers; offshore “investment” banksters; money launderers; amazingly creative and immoral bookkeepers with “accounting” pliable enough to fit any intent or circumstance; insurance, banking, savings and loans, and auto industry CEOs, CFOs, COOs; and unethical officers and board members that collectively comprise “The Richest One Percent Club:” What follows could be questioned.
But, careful review of data shows the Bush/Cheney/Baucus tax subsidies for the UltraRich as perhaps the greatest transfer of wealth and power in the shortest amount of time, from low-to-middle income Americans to multimillionaires and billionaires, ever accomplished in America; possibly excluding the Congressional land grants (giveaways) in the second half of the 1800s of 200 million acres of public land to railroads, the then-largest corporate powers with the most clout in Congress.
THE RICHEST ONE PERCENT GET RICHER:
Those earning more than $1 million a year saw their taxes drop the most, with the largest subsidies going to the top 1 percent of taxpayers, who reaped averages of $100,000 a year.
The rich clearly get richer, especially those lucky and so very elusive “Job Creators.” This carefully-chosen moniker is purposeful: Fundamentalists and Apocalyptic Christians now leading the Republican Party just LOVE iconic God-like imagery.
Far-right strategists understand that strong so-called “Christian values” messaging and consistent utilization of such “sanctified” language ultimately mean far less resistance from spineless Democrats.
WHILE 99 PERCENT GET POORER:
The fact that low and middle income taxpayers further subsidizing the richest one percent of Americans does NOT create ANY new jobs doesn’t matter a whit. What matters is public perception!
BUSH AND BAUCUS TANK THE NATION’S ECONOMY:
In 2010, the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service projected 10-year revenue losses from the Bush/Cheney/Baucus tax subsidies to One Percenters at $2.9 trillion, with an additional $606 billion in interest, for a combined total of $3.5 trillion.
The Congressional Budget Office in 2010 estimated extending the Bush/Baucus tax subsidies for the wealthy from 2011 to 2020 would add $3.3 trillion to the national debt, comprising of $2.65 trillion in foregone tax revenue plus another $660 billion for interest and debt service costs.
BAUCUS REAPS THE DIVIDENDS:
While the nation foundered under the enormous losses incurred by Bush’s, Cheney’s, and Baucus’ tax subsidies for multimillionaires and billionaires; Baucus’ gambit paid off handsomely for himself. The Senate isn’t called “The Millionaires’ Club” for nothing. Every Senator getting backdoor pay increases of $100,000 a year is peachy keen! That’s another hundred grand “spending around town” cash, about which taxpayers and other suckers will never know, into each Senator’s already-bulging wallet or purse.
Beyond personal enrichment, as the federal budget surplus began disappearing and the deficit steadily climbed, Baucus raked in more special-interest cash than any other senator, according to a 2006 Public Citizen report that reviewed the years 1999 to 2005.
“WITH A LITTLE HELP FROM HIS FRIENDS”–BAUCUS SPENDS $34.46 PER VOTE!
For his 2008 reelection, Baucus extracted an astounding $12 million from K Street lobbyists for Big Pharma, Big Insurance, Big Finance, and other industries Baucus “regulates,” as chairman of the canonical U.S. Senate Finance Committee. Actual Montanans (remember them?) shelled out a full 5 percent of “their” U.S. Senate candidate’s funding. After all was said and done, Baucus had spent a mind-boggling $34.46 per vote!
Before the “batshit crazy” U.S. Supreme Court appointments of Bush and Cheney; Democrats represented people, while Republicans represented money. That all changed with Baucus, the raised-rich-and-Republican accidental Democrat holding the fourth most powerful position in Bush’s and Cheney’s Washington, D.C.
Baucus lowered the bar to where pro-corporate alleged “Democrats” now represent money just as obsessively and venally as Republicans. Forget Democracy. Now, it’s strictly “Pay to Play.” Should they protest, The People be damned! Let them eat cake…
CAN YOU SAY: COUP D’ÉTAT?
To ensure deification of plutocracy, the increasingly “activist” U.S. Supreme Court pushed Democracy off the precipice: UnConstitutionally interfering with a state’s election laws; stopping that state from counting its votes for president; and, then, unilaterally appointing the loser of the 2000 election as president was as blatant as a brass knuckled sucker-punching groin-kicking coup d’état can get.
A truer gentleman, Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens, wrote, in mourning: “What must underlie petitioners’ entire federal assault on the Florida election procedures is an unstated lack of confidence in the impartiality and capacity of the state judges who would make the critical decisions if the vote count were to proceed. Otherwise, their position is wholly without merit. The endorsement of that position by the majority of this Court can only lend credence to the most cynical appraisal of the work of judges throughout the land.”
BUSH THE UNELECTED’S PERMANENT STATE OF WAR:
With the nonelected “chickenhawks” Bush, Cheney, and Donald Rumsfeld, their erratic recycled “Cold Warrior” Secretary of Defense/War, promoting wars everywhere at all times against everybody, bills piled up big-time.
It costs a lot to train, install, and then continually bribe every dictator! Just ask our past carefully-recruited and extensively funded CIA “assets:” Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden.
As for American military forces occupying between 130 and 140 foreign countries; damn straight these countries have the oil and gas, pipelines, forests, water, minerals, and other amenities we need to pay for our eternally carrying the “White Man’s Burden”!
If you dared question the panicked Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld/Fox/Murdoch insanity/inanity of the day—If you dared represent Truth: The United States regularly recruits, hires, trains, funds, and arms the likes of Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden worldwide; there were no WMDs, no al-Qaeda links, and no enriched uranium in Iraq; Osama bin Laden was not in Afghanistan; the planned invasions of Columbia and Iran were as overtly stupid and unwinnable as invading and occupying Iraq and Afghanistan; you were harshly and publicly judged an “enemy,” even a “terrorist,” to be attacked, censored, censured, kidnapped, imprisoned, tortured, and murdered; all with no arraignment, counsel or trial.
BUSH THE UNELECTED REPEALS 900 YEARS OF CIVILIZED LAW:
Bush the Unelected revoked civilized law, when he repealed habeas corpus, guaranteed by the Magna Carta 900 years ago: “No Freeman shall be taken or imprisoned, or be disseised of his Freehold, or Liberties, or free Customs, or be outlawed, or exiled, or any other wise destroyed; nor will We not pass upon him, nor condemn him, but by lawful judgment of his Peers, or by the Law of the land.”
BUSH THE UNELECTED VIOLATES GENEVA CONVENTIONS.
BUSH THE UNELECTED PROMOTES WIDESPREAD TORTURE AND ABUSE OF WAR VICTIMS AND PRISONERS:
Bush the Uneleced desecrated nearly-unanimous worldwide sympathy extended to the United States after the tragedies of September 11, 2001; by authorizing routine torture and abuse of prisoners–most of them noncombatants–in direct violation of four Geneva Convention Treaties signed by the United States and of three other Geneva Protocols that govern treatment of war victims and prisoners.
BUSH THE UNELECTED REJECTS 235 YEARS OF PUBLIC DISCOURSE:
Bush the Unelected insulted every independent-thinking person in the World when, on September 20, 2001, he told a joint session of the U.S. Congress: “Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists.”
Bush the Unelected shocked every man and woman in uniform by ordering the terrorists to “bring it on!”
NONELECTED “CHICKENHAWK” COMMANDER-IN-CHIEF INVITES ENEMIES TO ATTACK U.S. TROOPS!
U.S. Sen. Frank Lautenberg (D-New Jersey) said he couldn’t believe Bush’s “irresponsible and inciteful” (inciting) language.
“I am shaking my head in disbelief,” Lautenberg said. “When I served in the Army in Europe during World War II, I never heard any military commander—let alone the Commander-in-Chief—invite enemies to attack U.S. Troops!”
As for the closest chain of command, how could brave soldiers NOT be stirred into battle by Chickenhawk Secretary of War Donald Rumsfeld’s inspirational, lucid, and motivational eloquence? “There are known knowns,” Rumsfeld carefully explained on February 12, 2002. “There are things we know we know,” he continued. “We also know there are known unknowns. That is to say, we know there are some things we do not know, but there are also unknown unknowns. The ones we don’t know, we don’t know.” 4
OBAMA AND DEMOCRATS EMBRACE BUSH’S AND CHENEY’S INFAMOUS “DARK SIDE”:
Aerial bombardments of anything; tortures and black ops everywhere; black budgets and black bases anywhere; targeted assassinations against whomever we don’t like at the moment; massive prisons out in the middle of nowhere holding thousands of people proven guilty of nothing; and other perversities conjured by Dick Cheney’s infamous “Dark Side” are now the norm.
The change in administrations from Bush/Cheney to Barack Obama/Joe Biden has meant nothing. Contrary to oft-declared and much-appreciated campaign promises; Guantanamo remains open, torture continues unabated worldwide, and wars, up a couple more in Africa, continue, with Afghanistan now the U.S.A.’s longest war, costing half a trillion dollars.5
President Obama’s Military/Industrial/Surveillance Complex now captures and stores two billion of Americans’ private e-mails and telephone calls a day, reports the New Yorker.
NO DEMOCRACY ABROAD EQUALS NO DEMOCRACY AT HOME:
Do Indigenous Peoples particularly enjoy being militarily occupied by ham-handed Americans determined to steal their resources?
If not, Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Obama, and Baucus are right: To ensure resources for the One Percenters to maintain their coveted livestyle; low-to-middle income Americans must forever finance endless wars against infinite enemies abroad–Not only with their hard-earned money, but with their crimson blood; because military enlistment is the ONLY way most low-income and middle-income folks can get access to decent health care and post-high school educations.
As for the needy back in the “HomeLand”–Bush’s, Cheney’s, and Rumsfeld’s Nazi-esque jargon, so heartwarming for them, so heartrending for us—Obama, his henchmen Rahm Emanuel and Jim Messina, Baucus, and other pro-Corporate weak-kneed “Democrats” apparently believe the public must quit “whining” (yes, that’s the word they use) and appreciate unAmerican Corporate personhood, ultimate Corporate dictatorships, and a domestic police state enforced by heavily-armed right-wing paramilitary “SWAT Teams” and clandestine “Drug Task Forces” controlling every American community.
EMPIRE AND DEMOCRACY ARE MUTUALLY EXCLUSIVE.
So, now we have a “SuperCongress”6 of dubious Constitutionality, comprised of “SuperPeople,” (aka: Severely-compromised out of touch “Entitled Aristocrats,” like Baucus and Congress’ many other multimillionaires), that is meeting in secret behind closed doors, cutting deals, and setting things right.
Will the “SuperCongress:”
1. Defund the Military/Industrial/Surveillance Complex’s endless countless overseas wars against civilian populations and infrastructures; and restore all of these so-very-desperately-needed funds back to domestic U.S. priorities, such as: Education, nutrition, health care, clean air, pure water, and mass transit?
2. Most importantly: Restore civilian rule back to the United States of America, by reasserting Congress’ Constitutional powers to stop illegal presidential and bureaucratic war-making and to impeach Big Money’s disastrous “bought-and-paid-for” “activist” U.S. Supreme Court for halting a general election; unConstitutionally appointing a favored family friend, far too stupid to earn the position, as President; subverting our Constitution and slogging ever-deeper into dead-end Corporate fascism; a paramilitary police state FAR more invasive than anything previously imagined by even the most paranoid?
Will Washington D.C. politicians “Do the Right Thing,” just as DC comics’ heroes or even stars in Spike Lee films? Does former Nazi and Inquisition leader, Joseph Aloisius Ratzinger, now calling himself Pope Benedict XVI, shit in the woods?
FEDERAL BUDGET/SUPERCONGRESS SPOILER ALERT:
FORGET ALL BIBLICAL NONSENSE ABOUT “PLOWSHARES!” 7
THE SMART MONEY IS INTO “SWORDS!” 7
The United States of America spend more money on war than all other countries combined.
Don’t expect Baucus, Obama, or any “SuperCongress”6 to address the two-thirds (66 percent) of our federal budget devoted to killing people; occupying their countries with 1,000 military bases; and protecting Big Oil, the rich Corporatocracy, Big Media, and their wholly-owned subsidiaries— Congress, Supreme Court, President, and their farcical Tweedledum-Tweedledee Democrat-Republican duopoly.
It should be noted that, in their federal budget analyses, the fiercest Berserkers against government deficits and federal debt–Tea Partiers, Fox “News,” and other far right wingers–REFUSE to acknowledge paying off massive interest, continually accruing from expenditures on prior wars, killings, invasions, and occupations; as part of the federal budget.
So, their “heads-permanently-stuck-in-the-sand” figures run closer to 60 percent of the budget for present and future killings. The most dishonest, like Fox, cook the books even further, jimmying down the costs of so many wars-without-end, by tossing Social Security, an entirely separate budget, into the mix. (Adding unconceivable hypocrisy, the most Patriarchal right-wing Americans: War-demanding Apocalyptic Christians and war-loving Fundamentalist Christians consider themselves strongly “pro-life.”)
On the other hand, well-informed experts in the field peg war and military expenditures at about 70 percent of the total federal budget; when interest past due and “black operations” are factored.
In truth, there is no definitive percentage, as Congress is not informed on black operations and black operations’ costs are never exposed. The public never knows where we are building dozens of top secret black ops bases. These black ops bases never appear on maps and their budgets are never subjected to Congressional approval.
In general, once a country is occupied with covert black ops bases, the chances are minimal those bases will ever close and maximal that overt warfare against that country’s and/or adjacent countries’ civilian populations and infrastructures will soon commence.
THE EMPEROR’S NEW CLOTHES:
As for early-20th Century American labor organizers’ cries for “Bread and Roses,” both are most certainly “off the table,” to use the odious term with which “Big Pharma Baucus” Imperially and immediately dismissed public health care options preferred by most Americans.
Baucus’ years-long arrogance against the public; his so-extremely-painful-to-witness public fumbling and bungling of health care; his steadfast devotion to subsidizing billionaires and TOTAL public revulsion against Baucus’ last-second desperate attempts to force a 1,900-plus-page bill containing $1.27 trillion of pure adulterated “pork” (well, “lard,” actually) through the final days of the 2010 Democratic Congress were everything the Republicans needed to take over the U.S. House in 2011, capture the Democrats’ now- rudderless, meaningless, and dysfunctional U.S. Senate; and even the White House in the 2012 elections; with Baucus, the $12-million man himself, biting the dust in November 2014.
SO, GUNS GALORE “ARMAMENTS ‘R US” U.S.A. HAS NO BREAD AND NO ROSES.
Just bereaved pensioners; homeless vets; disabled and elderly Medicare and Medicaid patients; countless millions suffering from joblessness, depression and mental illness, poor education, no mass transit, no health care, minimal nutrition with 45 million Americans relying on Food Stamps (now called “Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program” or “SNAP”), and upon winter heating assistance for their very survival; desperately clawing and fighting amongst themselves for the crumbs from the One Percenters’ tables, as if their very lives depended upon it. For, they do.
EXPECT NO RELIEF FROM ACTIVIST U.S. SUPREME COURT:
Relief is nowhere in sight. The now alarmingly “activist” U.S. Supreme Court remains permanently stuck in “batshit crazy” mode, ruling that: Whoever has the most money has the most “ free speech;” Big Government owns and controls every female American’s womb; Big Government has the right to dictate IF fully-informed, consenting adult Americans can love, WHO we love, and HOW we love. Under the falangist Scalia Court, Big Government even proscribes if we marry and who we must choose as spouses!
According to today’s “activist” U.S. Supreme Court, the miracle of Life itself can now be patented, owned, and exploited by Big Corporations–taking both immorality and slavery to extremes not seen since 1857, when the Supreme Court ruled, seven-to-two, that Americans of discernible African descent were ineligible for citizenship in the United States of America, “the Land of the Free.”
To notorious One Percenters like Supreme Court Justices Scalia, Alito, Roberts, that creepy brain-dead black guy, and their ilk: Americans of color are not people; but Corporations of any stripe ARE people!
Yes, these decadent off-shores-based transnational unAmerican Corporations sucking the life’s blood from our dying American Empire and our own polluted, corrupted nation; are somehow actual living, breathing “people,” with all inherent Constitutional privileges of “personhood;” BUT―quite conveniently―NO accompanying unsavory liabilities of us mere mortals, such as paying taxes or dying!
BIG NEWS—DEMOCRATS HAVE GIVEN UP REPRESENTING THE PEOPLE!
It is hardly news that inmates have taken over the asylum on the Potomac.
But, it is indeed news that Democrats, so perfectly bovine in blissful and wholesale denial of the inevitable butchering sure to ensue, have now given up representing the People; instead preferring corpulence, so generously proffered at copious corporate feedlots.
CRY, MY BELOVED COUNTRY:
Franklin Delano Roosevelt, John Fitzgerald Kennedy, Robert Francis Kennedy, and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. would have no clue who these corporate-shilling so-called “Democrat” Pretenders are; spending an obscene $34.46 for every single vote!
FDR, JFK, RFK, and MLK would never believe their beloved America, in the greatly-anticipated 21st Century, is now a country where poor people starve, can’t get homes or jobs, can’t receive good educations or medical care, and ultimately die; due to so many, many, many resources diverted to endless overseas invasions, wars, and military occupations; all loyally facilitated by cheerleading and obfuscation from Big Media–directly owned by defense contractors or fully controlled through interlocking boards and staffs from the Military/Industrial/Surveillance Complex’s perpetual war machine.
BAUCUS DILIGENTLY MAINTAINS THE STATUS QUO:
But, hey, inside the Beltway, the rich are just fine, thank you very much.
U.S. Sen. Baucus (Corporate D-Mont.) is now ranked by GQ Magazine as the fourth most powerful person in Washington, D.C.
“He may represent a state populated by only 967,000 people,” writes GQ, “but as chairman of the committee that controls the money and as the recipient of very large amounts of lobbying dollars per citizen represented, Baucus controls the fate of every bill to affect all 300 million Americans.
“Health care? Cap and trade? Light rail? All roads lead through Baucus. Although he has a reputation for not playing nice with fellow senators, when the White House hires staff partly because of their close ties to him, he has all the friends he needs,” concluded GQ, referring to Jim Messina, who GQ ranked as 25th most powerful; served as Baucus’ Chief of Staff, President Barack Obama’s Deputy Chief of Staff, and, ominously, is now campaign manager for Obama’s 2012 reelection bid.
In an “only-inside-the-Beltway” absurdity comparable to Obama’s hiring Lawrence Summers and Timothy Geithner to straighten out economic chaos they created; corporate Democrat Baucus, still doling out $3.3 trillion to $3.5 trillion of taxpayer-provided subsidies to America’s multimillionaires and billionaires, is now the key player in the 12-member “Joint Select Committee on Deficit Reduction,” or “SuperCongress,”6 charged with cutting at least $1.5 trillion over 10 years.
PERSONAL ACCOUNTABILITY?
To date, Baucus has expressed no regrets or apologies for his pivotal role in defunding local, state, and federal governments; limitless funding for the One Percenters, with all their “Too Big to Fail” scams; and other lobbyists-concocted schemes that bankrupted the country and caused economic tailspins worldwide.
PUBLIC ACCOUNTABILITY?
As for public accountability for what Bush, Cheney, and Baucus did in 2001: Forget it. Experienced reporters with the prerequisite skills to handle this story were fired, laid off, or bought out years ago.
With extremely few exceptions; Corporate media, purposefully preoccupied with cheap, tawdry, mind-numbing “McNews,” “LifeStyles,” unbridled celebrity gossip, ad nauseam; have left this whole sordid story of the enormous costs of subsidizing the Wealthy and enforcing their Corporate Imperialism and dictatorships across the globe uncovered.
Why stir a hornet’s nest? It will just upset their Big Media/Big Military/Big Everything bosses; considerably enriched by and quite grateful for the grandiose “cover” provided by Bush’s, Cheney’s, and Baucus’ trillions in tax subsidies and resultant “Class Wars,” for which Corporate Media happily blame America’s 99 Percenters; hapless victims all.
BIG MEDIA ARE THE ONE PERCENTERS!
There is no more “news” in Big Corporate Media; just as there are no more “beats,” with no more well-informed “reporters” covering them.
Instead, “talking points” are established by Big Media, big advertisers, and the anti-democratic “military-industrial complex” so accurately described by Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower, in his phenomenally prescient “Farewell Address,” delivered January 17, 1961, during his final days as President.
“In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex,” warned President Eisenhower, the only military general elected president during the 20th Century.
“The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist. We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes.
“We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together,” concluded Eisenhower in his final statement as president. 8
GENERAL ELECTRIC’S NEWS DIVISION:
For example, do you really think General Electric’s Tom Brokaw, Brian Williams, or any other interchangeable GE Talking Head (GE’s first prominent Talking Head was a washed-up 1930s broadcaster and 1940s B movie actor named Ronald Reagan, who morphed into GE’s highly-paid bunkum huckster from 1954 to 1962), is going to tell you that GE, a principle “defense” contractor, nuclear weapons builder, and arms exporter that receives billions from our government, paid NO taxes in 2010 on $5 billion in U.S. profits and $14.2 billion in worldwide profits?
How about GE/NBC flacks Brokaw or Williams disclosing that, even though it paid no taxes, GE milked $4.7 billion in tax subsidies in 2008, 2009, and 2010; from actual U.S. taxpayers. Attention 99 Percenters: That’s US!
Or, can we count on GE’s “news” sycophants letting us know that five top GE executives paid themselves annual salaries totaling $75.9 million in 2010? Or, will GE’s “news” division even let us know how much it pays Williams to spin the news (approximated at $10 million annually)?
Some news outlets (not GE’s NBC, of course) did point out that, more than 40 years ago, GE was alerted by its own in-house engineers about severe dangers posed by the six nuclear power plants GE designed for the coastline of Fukushima Prefecture, Japan. As experts so accurately predicted, in March 2011, the Fukushima nuclear reactors exploded and experienced core meltdowns, in the world’s greatest nuclear power disaster since the spring 1986 fires, explosions, and reactor meltdowns at Chernobyl, Ukraine.
To summarize: Can you say the word: “Meltdown”? Brokaw and Williams can’t. Or, won’t. You get the idea.
TALKING HEADS’ TALKING POINTS:
President Eisenhower’s stern warnings notwithstanding, Big Media’s “talking point” edicts are sent down the food chain to poorly-paid and badly-treated minions, with strict orders to stay “on message.” Those that don’t or who occasionally lapse into vestigial ethics are summarily fired.
As a result, the young and preciously naïve MBAs now running corporate newsrooms actually consider nuclear power safe. They are one in believing, as the delusional Cheney (refer to above quotes), that Bush and Cheney were actually elected or that Afghanistan can actually be conquered.
VELVEETA NEWS:
These purposefully ill-informed publishers and editors quaintly refer to their totally-demoralized and highly-transient reporters-converted-into-stenographers as: “content providers.”
Instead of working what-used-to-be-their “beats,” Big Media’s absurdly few surviving “content providers” haunt increasingly smaller and ever-more-cloistered newsrooms; cynically keeping each other “on message;” eternally copying, cutting, pasting, and “processing” their corporate “product,” “content,” “filler,” or whatever other trash is so generously tossed their way by extravagantly-compensated corporate flacks; back-stabbing pundits; other Beltway insiders and lobbyists; Big Media’s soothsayers; Big Military’s current and retired Top Brass; “embedded” (in-bedded) so-called “journalists;” unAmerican Corporations with whom Big Media and Big Military incestuously merge; celebrities’ public relations personnel; and politicians’ myriad spin doctors.
DEMOCRATS FRAUDULENTLY BLAME “TEA PARTY” FOR ECONOMIC DISASTER―NOT BAUCUS!
Democrats now fraudulently blame the nascent Big Oil-f unded “Tea Party,” which didn’t even exist when Baucus carried Bush’s tax subsidies for billionaires through the U.S. Senate, for the country’s financial meltdown and resultant downgrading of the U.S.A.’s credit rating!
In a September 26, 2011, fund-raising letter that fails entirely to mention the radical economic shifts and exponential rippling that Bush and Baucus are bringing down upon us all with their 2001 tax breaks for billionaires, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nevada), reproves: “The recent ‘Tea Party downgrade’ of our credit rating is the last straw!”
“No matter what they say, the Republican plan is just George W. Bush all over again,” claims Reid, as he asks for even more money from loyal but ever-so-ignorant Democrats to stop “the GOP’s radical agenda. More wasteful tax breaks for millionaires and billionaires, more special giveaways to special interests, and still no help for working families.”
BIG MEDIA’S ECHO CHAMBER:
Media stenographers, sans Fox of course, dutifully report Democrats’ false allegations that everything is the “Tea Party’s” fault, with no reference to corporate Democrat Baucus’ seminal persona.
After work, Corporate Media’s ever-diminishing staffers, clinging by their very fingernails to miserable always-on-the-chopping-block corporate jobs, partake in enough alcohol or THC to temporarily anesthetize their complicities.
If it were only 20 years earlier, they could tune into The Tonight Show on NBC and watch Johnny Carson’s late night comedic character “Carnac the Magnificent,” who answered questions before even seeing or hearing them, utilize his amazing psychic abilities to predict the following, come late-November:
LOOT AND BOUNTY APLENTY SPELL MUNIFICENT THANKSGIVINGS FOR BILLIONAIRES AND, OF COURSE, CONGRESS;
LUMPS OF COAL FOR THE LUCKIEST YOUNG, JOBLESS, POOR, SICK, HOMELESS, ELDERLY, AND DISABLED AMERICANS;
NADA FOR THE REST; AND
EVERMORE BLANK CHECKS FOR WARS, BOMBS, INVASIONS, OCCUPATIONS, AND KILLINGS.
Baucus’ “SuperCongress”6 must report to both House and Senate by November 23, 2011, with both houses constrained to “thumbs up” or “thumbs down,” and no filibusters or amendments allowed.
©2011, Paul Thomas Richards
EDITOR’S NOTES:
1. Please stay tuned for future installments of “The Best and the Brightest, Circa 21st Century” and Dispatches from the Wildlands™, when we begin exploring Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus’ favorite “pork.” Having undergone 11 surgeries in recent years, I need financial help to conduct this needed research. I welcome any and all support from inquisitive fans and readers, editors, agents, and publishers committed to accountability for public officials and government. Please contact me at: Paul@PRMediaConsultants.com .
2. RE: “The Best and the Brightest.” In 2001, Pulitzer-Prize-winning reporter David Halberstam (1934 – 2007) said he named his 1972 classic about the United States’ wars against Southeast Asia, “The Best and the Brightest,” to refer to military, industry, and political insiders who, instead of diplomacy, insisted on “brilliant policies that defied common sense.” (These policies included: Massacres; “carpet bombings;” killing entire forests, forest inhabitants, and watersheds throughout Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos with deadly toxins; destroying most agricultural, civilian and religious infrastructures, including vital dikes and waterways thousands of years in the making; draining and mining rice paddies and other agricultural lands; slaughtering water buffaloes (the Vietnamese “tractors”); forcing farmers and other rural Vietnamese into concentration camps (or, in CIA-speak: “strategic hamlets”); drug running; tortures; assassinations; and other terrorism against civilian populations).
3. A significantly shorter version of this piece appeared in the monthly news magazine, In These Times.
4. Slate has compiled a collection of what Slate calls Rumsfeld’s “Poems,” containing Rumsfeld’s exact quotes, every bit as lucid as the above, from official transcripts. Political masochists CLICK HERE for more of Rumsfeld’s imaginative wisdom.
5. For up-to-the-minute costs of American wars since 2001, go to: http://costofwar.com/en/.
6. Since no amendments will be allowed and all other publicly-elected senators and congressional representatives are excluded from all decision-making; this possibly unConstitutional, or, at the very least, extraConstitutional “SuperCongress,” or “Super Congress” is far more powerful than any type of Congressional “committee,” “SuperCommittee,” or “Super Committee” —All terms preferred by Big Corporate Media, since their use of “Committee” conveys false impressions of public participation and accountability.
7. “They shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks: Nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more.” (Isaiah II: Verse IV).
8. Not only were Gen. Eisenhower’s January 17, 1961, “Farewell Address” forewarnings about the Military/Industrial Complex prescient, they were extremely significant historically.
Almost 166 years earlier, America’s first great military leader, General George Washington, named President by unanimous consent from both the Constitutional Convention and Electoral College, had also warned Congress against “Pretended Patriotism,” Foreign Wars, and “Mischiefs of Foreign Intrigue.”
Gen. Washington, the American Colonies’ most prominent leader in their successful Revolution against the monopolistic and dictatorial “British East India Company,” then one of the world’s largest “mega-corporations,” knew, from a lifetime of first-hand experiences, the extreme dangers of war.
So, on September 19, 1796, as the new United States of America’s first retiring President, Gen. Washington, in his own seminal “Farewell Address” also cautioned Congress about ill-advised foreign wars:
“Against the insidious wiles of foreign influence, I conjure you to believe me, fellow-citizens, the jealousy of a free people ought to be constantly awake; since history and experience prove that foreign influence is one of the most baneful foes of republican Government.
“But that jealousy, to be useful, must be impartial; else it becomes the instrument of the very influence to be avoided, instead of a defense against it.
“Excessive partiality for one foreign nation, and excessive dislike of another, cause those whom they actuate to see danger only on one side, and serve to veil and even second the arts of influence on the other.
“Real Patriots, who may resist the intrigues of the favourite, are liable to become suspected and odious; while its tools and dupes usurp the applause and confidence of the people, to surrender their interests.
“Tis our true policy to steer clear of permanent alliances, with any portion of the foreign world;—so far, I mean, as we are now at liberty to do it;—for let me not be understood as capable of patronizing infidelity to existing engagements.
“I hold the maxim no less applicable to public than to private affairs, that honesty is always the best policy.—I repeat it therefore let those engagements be observed in their genuine sense.—But, in my opinion, it is unnecessary and would be unwise to extend them.
“In offering to you, my Countrymen, these counsels of an old and affectionate friend, I dare not hope they will make the strong and lasting impression, I could wish,—that they will control the usual current of the passions, or prevent our Nation from running the course which has hitherto marked the destiny of Nations.
“But if I may even flatter myself, that they may be productive of some partial benefit; some occasional good, that they may now and then recur to moderate the fury of party spirit, to warn against the mischiefs of foreign intrigue, to guard against the impostures of pretended patriotism, this hope will be a full recompense for the solicitude for your welfare, by which they have been dictated.”
9. A journalist with more than 44 years’ experience, Paul Thomas Richards has covered politics and resource issues in the American West since 1968, serving as editor or co-editor of three newspapers, newsman and editor for The Associated Press, and elections manager for The AP, UPI, ABC, CBS, CNN and NBC. Richards founded and produced a successful radio news network; founded and hosted a political television interview program; founded and managed a news service for weekly newspapers; and authored a syndicated political column.
Richards owns a leading consulting firm for nonprofit organizations and Indigenous Peoples, PR Media Consultants®, Public Interest Media Since 1968™, near the community of Boulder, Mont.; works as a professional writer and editor; and contributes Dispatches from the Wildlands™, located on-line at: http://blogs.alternet.org/paulrichards/ to AlterNet.
More Dispatches from the Wildlands™ at: http://blogs.alternet.org/paulrichards/
Biographical information at: http://www.PRMediaConsultants.com
More biographical information at: http://www.Richards2006.us
COMING SOON! Watch for: http://www.DispatchesfromtheWildlands.info
“In Wildness is the Preservation of the World.”
Henry David Thoreau
April 23, 1851; Concord, Massachusetts
Paul Thomas Richards
IN-DEPTH ANALYSIS OF U.S. SEN. MAX BAUCUS’ 40-YEAR REIGN OVER CAPITOL HILL
COMING SOON!
Did you know that U.S. Sen. Max Baucus (Corporate D-Mont.) is now ranked: “The fourth most powerful person in Washington, D.C.”?
Did you know that U.S. Sen. Max Baucus (Corporate D-Mont.) spent an astounding $34.46 per vote, during his successful 2008 reelection bid?
For in-depth analysis of Baucus’ 40-year reign over Capitol Hill, tune into Paul Thomas Richards’ Dispatches from the Wildlands™, located at: http://blogs.alternet.org/paulrichards/ , this Thursday, September 29, 2011.
©2011, Paul Thomas Richards
Paul Thomas Richards ARE CORPORATE MEDIA AND SELF-SERVING POLITICIANS DESTROYING YOUR COMMUNITY?
Here are 86 Constructive Ways to Fight Back
The United States are big enough for everyone to have her or his own unique opinions and beliefs. And, with the exception of Faux “News,” Americans are gracious enough to respect each other, whether we disagree or not.
However, corporate media like Fox and most politicians try to use legitimate differences as ammunition for their own personal, political, economic, cultural, and religious wars. They try to divide us, separate us, instill inferiority in most, and superiority in some. This is NOT what America is about!
I’m not threatened by diversity. I grew up with kids of different colors from families of different faiths with widely different incomes. When I was young, I explored and attended all the churches in Helena, Mont. I felt that every one had legitimacy, whether I agreed with everything they said or not.
Even though we may ultimately choose to settle upon one community of faith; may we never close the doors to anyone because of race, creed, ethnicity, culture, or color!
Here are just a few ways to make sure we all stay open to each other:
- Attend plays; listen to music; watch movies; browse bookstores and libraries, or go to cultural events, festivals, dances, holidays, observances, and performances by artists whose race or ethnicity is different from your own.
- Volunteer at social services organizations.
- Attend services at a variety of churches, synagogues, mosques, cathedrals, and temples. Search out all types of information to learn about different faiths and beliefs.
- Visit local senior citizens’ centers and collect oral histories. Donate large-print reading materials and books on tape or CDs. Offer to help with craft projects and recreational opportunities.
- Visit ethnic neighborhoods and churches.
- Shop at ethnic grocery stores and specialty markets. Get to know the owners and staff. Ask about their family histories.
- Participate in school, library, church, and community diversity programs. For ideas, go to “Teaching Tolerance,” located at: http://www.tolerance.org/ .
- Ask a person of another cultural heritage to teach you how to perform a traditional dance, make traditional art and clothing, play traditional music, or cook a traditional meal.
- Learn sign language.
10. Take a conversation course in another language that is spoken in your community.
11. Teach an adult to read.
12. Speak up when you hear slurs, insults, discrimination, hated, and fear-mongering. Let people know that abusive speech and actions are not acceptable in pluralistic and constructive communities and societies.
13. Imagine what your life might be like if you were a person of another race, culture, religion, physical size or shape, mental ability, gender or sexual orientation, or economic standing. How might your “today” have been different? And, what about your “tomorrow”?
14. Study Native American history, civil rights, and civil liberties. Learn about tribal sovereignty. Tour tribal reservations and areas of special interest to Indigenous Americans. Visit historical sites, museums, and attend powwows.
15. Talk with your elders and research your family history. Share information about your heritage in talks to your school class, church and community organization, and in other conversations.
16. List all the stereotypes you can — positive and negative — about particular groups. Which of these stereotypes do you carry in your real-life words and actions?
17. Think about how you appear to others. List personality traits that are compatible with tolerance, like compassion, curiosity, and openness. List those traits that seem incompatible with tolerance; like jealousy, bossiness, hatred, fear, prejudice, and superiority.
18. Create an informal “diversity profile” of your friends, co-workers and acquaintances. Set the goal of expanding it a little further each year.
19. Invite someone of a different background to join your family for a meal or holiday.
20. Offer multi-cultural dolls, toys, music, or games as gifts.
21. Assess the cultural diversity reflected in your home’s artwork, furniture, food, music and literature. Add something new!
22. Don’t buy playthings, books, music, magazines, movies, and video games that promote violence and hatred. Withdraw all support from media and corporations that glorify war and violence over diplomacy and respectful communication.
23. Point out stereotypes and cultural misinformation depicted in movies, videos, newspapers, news and other television programming, Web sites; computer games, magazines, music, books, and other media.
24. Establish free and open dialogue about all social issues. Support your children—let them know that no subject is taboo. Too fat? Too slim? Too smart? Too stupid? Acne? Maturation? Different body type than peers? Talk about it!
25. Take your family or friends to an ethnic restaurant. Talk to the owners and staff. Look up information. Learn about more than just the food.
26. Create and support local food banks, soup kitchens, domestic violence support services, mental health programs, free or low cost health care, recycling centers, and animal shelters. One simple act of walking a dog temporarily trapped in a shelter’s cage will change the whole world for both of you!
27. Reduce, reuse, and recycle.
28. Support your community’s second hand stores.
29. Gather information about local volunteer opportunities and let your children select projects for family participation.
30. Involve all members of the family in selecting organizations for your charitable gifts and donations.
31. Are your heroes aggressive males? Help your children see heroic qualities in all those who may not be aggressive males, whose contributions often go unrecognized; such as health care workers, teachers, artists, poets, musicians, and those who volunteer for homeless and domestic abuse shelters, senior citizens’ homes, churches, recycling centers, community centers, food banks, soup kitchens, and animal refuges.
32. Affirm your children’s curiosity about various races, cultures, and ethnicities.
33. Help young children make an illustrated list of what friends do or what friendship means.
34. Read books and play music that contain multi-cultural and tolerance themes with children.
35. When you are angry, be careful not to hurt others. Watch what you say and do. Stay nonviolent in actions and words. Curb your road rage. Be an example for those around you.
36. Enroll your children in schools, daycare centers, after-school programs, library programs, sports, recreational programs, and camps that reflect and celebrate differences.
37. Participate in Big Brother or Big Sister programs.
38. Live in an integrated and economically diverse neighborhood.
39. Read a book, listen to music, or watch a movie about other cultures.
40. Donate diversity- and tolerance-related books, music, films, magazines and other materials to libraries. Organize book, cd, and dvd drives.
41. Buy art supplies for a local school. Sponsor a mural about the cultural composition and heritage of your community.
42. Volunteer to be an advisor for a students’ club.
43. Support a wide range of extracurricular activities, including band, orchestra, choir, speech, and drama, to help students find their place at school and nurture all aspects of their personality.
44. Coach a sports team. Encourage schools to provide equal resources for boys’ and girls’ athletics. Let every team member play and have fun.
45. Applaud the other teams. Promote good sportsmanship. Ban taunting.
46. Assess your school’s compliance with the accessibility requirements of the Americans with Disabilities Act. Organize a class project to improve compliance. For ideas, go to: http://www.ada.gov/ .
47. Donate tape or digital recorders to a school that is conducting oral history projects. Suggest a focus on local diversity and tolerance issues.
48. Start a pen pal program. Get students in touch with people in different parts of the state, country, and world.
49. Sponsor and support “Conflict Resolution” programs.
50. Provide confidential methods for students to report harassment, abuse, bullying, or violence.
51. Encourage school administrators to adopt Internet polices that challenge on-line hate, bullying, harassment, pornography, and violence.
52. Invite bilingual and multilingual students to give morning greetings and announcements on the PA system or at assemblies in their home languages.
53. Make sure that school cafeterias offer options for students and staff with dietary restrictions.
54. Always keep adoptive and foster children and children lacking responsible parents in mind; when planning educational or fun trips, programs, parties, sports, and other recreation.
55. Ask schools not to schedule tests or school meetings on the major holidays of any religious group. Develop a school calendar that respects religious diversity.
56. Hold a “diversity potluck” lunch. Invite co-workers to bring dishes that reflect their cultural heritage.
57. Arrange a “box-lunch forum” on topics of diverse cultural and social interest.
58. Partner with a local school or library and encourage your colleagues to serve as tutors or mentors.
59. Value the input of everyone.
60. Push for equitable leave policies, including paid maternity and paternity leave.
61. Provide employees with paid leave to participate in volunteer projects.
62. Publicize corporate giving widely, and challenge other companies to match or exceed your efforts.
63. Keep your office door open whenever possible. Foster an open and supportive work environment.
64. Encourage locally-owned and minority-owned businesses; and get to know the proprietors and staff.
65. Support locally-owned and publicly-owned media, such as community radio and television stations.
66. Participate in blood drives, or clean up a local park or stream. Identify such issues that reach across racial, ethnic, and other divisions; and forge alliances for tackling them.
67. Hold a community-wide yard sale and use the proceeds to improve a park, community center, or library. Celebrate the event with a potluck picnic!
68. Support community gardening programs.
69. Build/Plant a local community “Peace Garden.”
70. Start a “language bank” of volunteer interpreters for all languages used in your community.
71. Encourage fellow members of your community to be “Tolerance Activists.” For ideas, check out “Teaching Tolerance,” located at: http://www.tolerance.org/.
72. Create a Web site for your town, school, library, church, or social organization.
73. Host a “multi-cultural extravaganza” such as a food fair or art, fashion and talent show.
74. Establish and fund mobile libraries to make multi-cultural books and films widely available, especially to poorly-served inner urban areas and rural reservations.
75. Establish an ecumenical alliance. Bring people of diverse faiths together for retreats, workshops or potluck dinners. Welcome agnostics and atheists too!
76. Write a letter to the editor, if your newspaper ignores any segment of the community or refuses to carry stories about local cooperation and tolerance.
77. Contact the owners and manager, if your local television or radio station downplays the importance and strength inherent in diversity.
78. Start a campaign to establish a multi-cultural center for the arts. Ask local museums, performance venues, libraries, and other learning centers to host exhibits and events reflecting diversity at home and elsewhere.
79. Present a “Disabilities Awareness” event with the help of a local, state, and national rehabilitation organizations; sheltered workshops, and community-based group homes.
80. Make sure that anti-discrimination protection in your community extends to all people, regardless of sexual orientation.
81. Encourage law enforcement agencies to establish diversity training for all officers, to utilize community-based policing, and to eliminate the use of inequitable tactics like racial and sexual profiling.
82. Help build a Habitat for Humanity home.
83. Conduct a “diaper equity” survey of local establishments. Commend managers who provide changing tables in men’s as well as women’s restrooms.
84. Register to vote. Support candidates and leaders that believe in tolerance and diversity and the sound communities these traits build.
85. Print out and share this list.
86. Brainstorm other ideas with your friends, family, church, school, and organizations that will help bring your community closer together.
SPECIAL BONUS # 87: Support light-rail intra-city and heavy-rail intercity mass transit wherever feasible; fully equipped to handle the disabled, elderly, shoppers and their stuff, bicyclists and their bicycles, and travelers and their gear. (Does anyone utilize baby strollers anymore, or have they been supplanted by baby backpacks and frontpacks?)
Dispatches from the Wildlands™ ©2005-2011 by Paul Richards
Editor’s Notes:
MANY thanks to the fine folks at Teaching Tolerance for their incredible array of resources. Check them out at http://www.tolerance.org/ . Send money, if you can. And/Or, sign up for their free Teaching Tolerance list-serv. Also, all educators can get a free subscription to Teaching Tolerance Magazine and free information kits, by CLICKING HERE.
A journalist with more than 43 years’ experience in Western politics and resource issues, Paul Richards has served as editor or co-editor of three newspapers, newsman and editor for The Associated Press, and elections manager for The AP, UPI, ABC, CBS, CNN and NBC.
Richards founded and produced a successful radio news network; founded and hosted a political television interview program; founded and managed a news service for weekly newspapers; and authored a syndicated political column.
Richards is a voluntarily-retired member of the Montana House of Representatives and a former candidate for the U.S. Senate.
Richards owns a leading consulting firm for nonprofit organizations and Indigenous Peoples, PR Media Consultants®, Public Interest Media Since 1968™, near the community of Boulder, Mont.; works as a professional writer and editor; and contributes Dispatches from the Wildlands™, located on-line at: http://blogs.alternet.org/paulrichards/ to AlterNet.
Paul Thomas Richards THE “SEASON OF HATE” IS OVER!
What’s not to like about the Mavs FINALLY winning their NBA rings? These guys are older than dirt: 13-year veteran Redirkulous, who single-handedly–torn tendons and all–completely reinvented big-man offense; 17-year (no typo) veteran Jason Kidd; 12-year Mavs’ stalwart Jason Terry; born-again Matrix and 12-year veteran Shawn Marion; 10-year veteran Tyson Chandler; 10-year veteran Brendan Haywood; 13-year veteran Peja Stojakovic; 11-year veteran “Joe Lunchbucket” Brian Cardinal; 9-year veteran All-Star Caron Butler; 11-year veteran DeShawn Stevenson; and the pride of Mayaguez, Puerto Rico, 5-year veteran sparkplug José Juan Barea.
That’s 123 years’ experience—perhaps the highest collective basketball IQ ever assembled on one Championship team–all masterfully respected and utilized by underrated Coach Rick Carlisle. And, who was the only owner in the NBA insane enough to raid the world’s senior citizens’ homes? Mark Cuban, aided by sheer magic from team alchemist, President Donnie Nelson.
Yes, the Mavs deserve every kudo they earned, through more than a century of against-all-odds, hard, dedicated, intelligent, and conscientious work.
As for the Heat, it is time to stop the hate. Now! How can any true basketball fan possibly hate steady-as-a-rock Chris Bosh, exiled to oblivion in Ontario, wherever the heck that is, for so many years? D-Wade is a TOTALLY class act, as is Coach Erik Spoelstra. I guess it all boils down to Pat Riley (some fanatics HATE success) and LeBron, who after 8 full years of big-time dues, is finally getting paid what he deserves.
OK. Maybe LeBron made a mistake or two. There is an outside chance LeBron is even human. Does that really mean we should HATE the most complete player currently in the League?
LeBron, you have NOTHING to be ashamed of. Please know that, as a true basketball fan, now that J Kidd, J Terry, the Matrix, and Dirk FINALLY have their title, I will now root for you getting yours. You are among the world’s greatest athletes. You are learning how to communicate. You have the courage to mature before our very eyes.
Miami, you need not hang your heads. Walk tall. You will get your rings. And, you will deserve every single one.
Then, it will be OKC’s turn, then Memphis’s. Life carries on. Or, at least it will, if the owners are not so colossally greedy and arrogant to lock us all out, come next Fall.
The “Season of Hate” is OVER!
Paul Richards
A journalist with more than 43 years’ experience in Western politics and resource issues, Paul Richards has served as editor or co-editor of three newspapers, newsman and editor for The Associated Press, and elections manager for The AP, UPI, ABC, CBS, CNN and NBC.
Richards founded and produced a successful radio news network; founded and hosted a political television interview program; founded and managed a news service for weekly newspapers; and authored a syndicated political column.
Richards is a voluntarily-retired member of the Montana House of Representatives and a former candidate for the U.S. Senate.
Richards owns a leading consulting firm for nonprofit organizations, PR Media Consultants®, Public Interest Media Since 1968®, near the community of Boulder, Mont.; works as a professional writer and editor; and contributes Dispatches from the Wildlands, located at: http://blogs.alternet.org/paulrichards/ to AlterNet.
Dispatches from the Wildlands™ ©2011, Paul Richards
Paul Thomas Richards Resources for Understanding “Blowback” and Other Permanent Damage Caused by Imperialism
This Memorial Day, in addition to Honoring those who have those who have bravely served in our armed forces and fallen or been disabled, let us also Honor all who have so courageously stood for Peace and against corruption, conscription, invasion, occupation, brutality, force, violence, torture, and genocide of Indigenous Peoples and Indigenous species.
And, as Empire and Democracy are, by their very natures, incompatible and mutually exclusive both at home and abroad, let us also pray for the end of the American Empire. For further study of the deleterious effects of Empire, you can’t beat Chalmers Johnson’s classic Empire series, including “The Sorrows of Empire: Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of the Republic;” “Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire;” “Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic;” and, written just before Chalmers’s death late last year: “Dismantling the Empire: America’s Last Best Hope.”
For an absolutely stunning, fascinating, and compelling read, check out the compendium of a dozen economic hit men’s and hit women’s stories from Inside the Beast: “A Game As Old As Empire: The Secret World of Economic Hit Men and the Web of Global Corruption,” edited by Steven Hiatt, with a forward by former economic hit man John Perkins.
Speaking of Perkins, to help you begin understanding this seemingly daunting topic, you can’t beat John’s eminently readable (all three read like butter), nontechnical, and courageous Empire series, including “Confessions of an Economic Hit Man;” “The Secret History of the American Empire – Economic Hit Men, Jackals, and the Truth;” and “Hoodwinked: An Economic Hit Man Reveals Why the World Financial Markets Imploded–and What We Need to Do to Remake Them.”
Although it can be sometimes painful–NOT due to her superb writing, but because her brilliant spot-on analyses of the agonizing death throes of the Corporatocracy and monstrous resultant damage wreaked upon so many innocent people and ecosystems–Naomi Klein’s “The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism” is a masterpiece that will likely remain a classic for decades.
William Blum’s incredibly comprehensive “Killing Hope: US Military and CIA Interventions Since World War II;”* “Rogue State: A Guide to the World’s Only Superpower;” “West-Bloc Dissident: A Cold War Memoir;” and “Freeing the World to Death: Essays on the American Empire” are all invaluable resources.
Blum’s free regular updates, Anti-Empire Reports, are also astounding resources–Well worth checking out! You can subscribe by going to: http://killinghope.org/#essays or by sending an e-mail to “bblum6@aol.com”, with the subject line “add.” For archives of monthly Anti-Empire Reports from 2003 (when William last fully revised “Killing Hope,” first published in 1995) to 2011, go to: http://killinghope.org/#essays.
Dispatches from the Wildlands™ ©2011, Paul Richards
———————————————————————————-
*1. China – 1945 to 1960s: Was Mao Tse-tung just paranoid?
2. Italy – 1947-1948: Free elections, Hollywood style.
3. Greece – 1947 to early 1950s: From cradle of democracy to client state.
4. The Philippines – 1940s and 1950s: America’s oldest colony.
5. Korea – 1945-1953: Was it all that it appeared to be?
6. Albania – 1949-1953: The proper English spy.
7. Eastern Europe – 1948-1956: Operation Splinter Factor.
8. Germany – 1950s: Everything from juvenile delinquency to terrorism.
9. Iran – 1953: Making it safe for the King of Kings.
10. Guatemala – 1953-1954: While the whole world watched.
11. Costa Rica – Mid-1950s: Trying to topple an ally – Part 1.
12. Syria – 1956-1957: Purchasing a new government.
13. Middle East – 1957-1958: The Eisenhower Doctrine claims another backyard for America.
14. Indonesia – 1957-1958: War and pornography.
15. Western Europe – 1950s and 1960s: Fronts within fronts within fronts.
16. British Guiana – 1953-1964: The CIA’s international labor mafia.
17. Soviet Union – Late 1940s to 1960s: From spy planes to book publishing.
18. Italy – 1950s to 1970s: Supporting the Cardinal’s orphans and techno-fascism.
19. Vietnam – 1950-1973: The Hearts and Minds Circus.
20. Cambodia – 1955-1973: Prince Sihanouk walks the high-wire of neutralism.
21. Laos – 1957-1973: L’Armée Clandestine.
22. Haiti – 1959-1963: The Marines land, again.
23. Guatemala – 1960: One good coup deserves another.
24. France/Algeria – 1960s: L’état, c’est la CIA.
25. Ecuador – 1960-1963: A text book of dirty tricks.
26. The Congo – 1960-1964: The assassination of Patrice Lumumba.
27. Brazil – 1961-1964: Introducing efficient death squads.
28. Peru – 1960-1965: Fort Bragg moves to the jungle.
29. Dominican Republic – 1960-1966: Saving democracy from communism by getting rid of democracy.
30. Cuba – 1959 to 1980s: The unforgivable revolution.
31. Indonesia – 1965: Imprisoning President Sukarno and exterminating 500,000 others. Denied medical care, Sukarno died of kidney failure in 1970. In 1975, military forces directed by President Suharto, Indonesia’s dictator from 1967 until 1998, and funded by the US, invaded and occupied East Timor, killing 200,000.
32. Ghana – 1966: Kwame Nkrumah steps out of line.
33. Uruguay – 1964-1970: Torture — as American as apple pie.
34. Chile – 1964-1973: A hammer and sickle stamped on your child’s forehead.
35. Greece – 1964-1974: “Fuck your Parliament and your Constitution,” said the President of the United States.
36. Bolivia – 1964-1975: Tracking down Che Guevara in the land of coup d’état.
37. Guatemala – 1962 to 1980s: A less publicized “final solution”.
38. Costa Rica – 1970-1971: Trying to topple an ally — Part 2.
39. Iraq – 1972-1975: Covert action should not be confused with missionary work.
40. Australia – 1973-1975: Another free election bites the dust.
41. Angola – 1975 to 1980s: The Great Powers Poker Game.
42. Zaire – 1975-1978: Mobutu and the CIA, a marriage made in heaven.
43. Jamaica – 1976-1980: Kissinger’s ultimatum.
44. Seychelles – 1979-1981: Yet another area of great strategic importance.
45. Grenada – 1979-1984: Lying — one of the few growth industries in Washington D.C.
46. Morocco – 1983: A video nasty.
47. Suriname – 1982-1984: Once again, the Cuban bogeyman.
48. Libya – 1981-1989: Ronald Reagan meets his match.
49. Nicaragua – 1981-1990: Destabilization in slow motion.
50. Panama – 1969-1991: Double-crossing our drug supplier.
51. Bulgaria 1990/Albania 1991: Teaching communists what democracy is all about.
52. Iraq – 1990-1991: Desert holocaust.
53. Afghanistan – 1979-1992: America’s Jihad.
54. El Salvador – 1980-1994: Human rights, Washington D.C. style.
55. Haiti – 1986-1994: Who will rid me of this turbulent priest?
56. The American Empire – 1992 to present.
Notes.
Appendix I: This is How the Money Goes Round.
Appendix II: Instances of Use of United States Armed Forces Abroad, 1798-1945.
Appendix III: U. S. Government Assassination Plots.
Index.
“Killing Hope,” published by Common Courage Press of Monroe, Maine, contains 470 pages, fully indexed. Its ISBN Number is: 1-56751-252-6. Swedish, French, Italian Korean, Arabic, Spanish, and German editions are all also available at: http://killinghope.org/#essays.
Paul Thomas Richards February 22, 2011
Dan Wenk, Superintendent
Yellowstone National Park
PO Box 168
Yellowstone, WY 82190-0168
Ph: 307-344-7381
Fax: 307-344-2005
E-mail: yell_superintendent@nps.gov
Dear Superintendent Wenk,
Congratulations on your appointment and your first day in the office! You have stepped directly into a buffalo wallow. I pray that you apply more common sense than your predecessors. PLEASE act as a true public servant and PLEASE provide proper stewardship for America’s many at-risk and endangered wildlife species, instead of continuing past failed National Park policies that facilitated the extirpation of our Nation’s priceless wildlife Heritage.
Since you are new, you may not know that Yellowstone’s bison herd is America’s ONLY population of wild, migrating bison. These bison now approach complete extinction, due to the unmitigated malfeasance of the US Department of Interior and the National Park Service.
THOUSANDS of pure-DNA bison—in fact, the world’s ONLY remaining pure-DNA wild bison–are being harassed, tortured, captured, and slaughtered in and around Yellowstone National Park.
This is a National, Tribal, and Inter-National disgrace–An affront to Earth’s biodiversity, all Indigenous Peoples, and the very mission of the National Park Service!
The National Park Service and Yellowstone National Park MUST withdraw from the failed “Inter-Agency Bison Management Plan,” which outlaws the very existence of living wild migrating bison in Montana; by establishing no-exceptions firing lines and unrestricted “Killing Fields.”
During the last 20 years, Yellowstone National Park’s immoral Killing Fields have exterminated 6,502 of the only wild migrating pure-DNA buffalo in the world.
Over the last decade alone, the US Department of Interior, National Park Service, Yellowstone National Park, and the Montana Department of Livestock has already slaughtered more than 4,000 (4,098) of the only remaining wild buffalo on Earth–National, Tribal, and Inter-National tragedies of such monumental proportions that tears, grief, sorrow, and shame can only begin to suffice.
Wild migrating buffalo are a vital American Legacy, fully deserving the respect and protection of the National Park Service, which, ironically and incredibly gallingly, uses these exterminated wild bison as its very own National Park Service badge and symbol!!
Wild migrating buffalo are rounded up and slaughtered by your own Yellowstone National Park employees, working side-by-side with Montana Department of Livestock’s trespassing “cowboys” on ATVs, ORVs, snowmobiles, helicopters, 4-wheel drives, and other forms of motorized terrorism and harassment, wholly inappropriate and often fatal during wintertime.
As a result, America’s only population of wild pure-DNA migrating buffalo can no longer follow tens of thousands of years of Ancient instincts; can no longer migrate to their traditional winter and spring habitats; and can no longer calve in their traditional calving areas.
I respectfully ask that you:
1. Please IMMEDIATELY abandon all participation in and funding of the disgraced “Inter-Agency Bison Management Plan.” Please end, ENTIRELY, the Plan’s ridiculous prohibition of living wild migrating buffalo in the state of Montana.
2. Please IMMEDIATELY withhold ALL funding of, ALL funding to, and ALL cooperation with the Montana Department of Livestock.
3. Please uphold the National Park Service’s mandate to protect Yellowstone’s buffalo, perhaps our Nation’s most important icon (Along with the bald eagle, which, thanks to dedicated conservation leadership in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, we were able to save from extinction!).
4. Please uphold the US Department of Interior’s stewardship responsibilities for America’s First Nations and Indigenous Peoples.
5. Please immediately release 600 wild Yellowstone buffalo, currently trapped in the “Stephens Creek Trap,” panicked and awaiting slaughter, back into the Wild.
6. Please work closely with the Gallatin National Forest and other National Forests to allow Yellowstone’s bison to migrate onto adjacent public lands. Despite beliefs to the contrary by your predecessors, allowing bison to migrate onto these National Forest lands is NOT optional! Since you are new, you may not know that the Gallatin National Forest’s Forest Plan MANDATES the Gallatin National Forest provide habitats for maintaining viable populations for Yellowstone’s bison and all other Indigenous species.
It is not too late for wild, migrating buffalo, although they teeter on extinction’s brink. I would like to assume that you are a dedicated public servant. If so, PLEASE fulfill the incredibly constructive potential of your new job.
Superintendent Wenk, it is up to YOU to stop this senseless slaughter, disgusting mindless violence, and continued genocide against America’s Indigenous Peoples and indigenous endangered species. NOW!
Please respond to this e-mail. Thank you.
Sincerely,
Paul Richards
30 Browns Gulch Road
Boulder, MT 59632-9709
Copy to:
Ken Salazar, Secretary
US Department of the Interior
1849 C Street, NW
Washington, DC 20240
Phone: 202-208-3100
Fax: 202-208-6965
E-Mail Address: feedback@ios.doi.gov
Jonathan Jarvis, Director
US Department of Interior
1849 C Street, NW
Room 3312
Washington, DC 20240
Phone: 202-208-4621; 202-208-3818
Fax: 202-208-7889
E-mail: jon_jarvis@nps.gov
National Park Service Contact Information
Relevant US Department of Interior and National Park Service Web Sites and Contact Information:
US Department of Interior On-Line Feedback Form
National Park Service Contact Information
US Fish and Wildlife E-mail Address
Bureau of Indian Affairs E-mail Address
Ethics Office Contact Information
Editor’s Notes:
The Killing Fields: For year-by-year breakdowns of Yellowstone National Park’s and Montana Department of Livestock’s wild buffalo slaughters, please CLICK HERE, or go to: http://www.buffalofieldcampaign.org/ .
Dan Wenk assumed his new position as Superintendent of Yellowstone National Park on Tuesday, February 22, 2011.
Wild buffalo are Sacred to Indigenous Peoples, Tribes, and First Nations, now dispersed throughout 12 Western states and three Western provinces. Fully ignorant of his inherent and sickening racism, Montana’s Governor, “Buffalo Brian” Schweitzer, addressing the Montana Stockgrowers Association’s Annual Convention on Friday, December 11, 2009, in Billings, Mont., proudly boasted: “No Governor in Montana history has sent more bison to slaughter than this Governor.”
Please send your comments to Wenk, Jarvis, and Salazar today! Your comments need not be lengthy, complicated, or legalese. Brief comments containing relevant information, true emotions, or legitimate feelings are just fine!
Although anger is certainly justifiable regarding the unconscionable slaughter of 6,502 of the last wild migrating buffalo in the world, try not to let this anger poison your comments.
Please remember that Wenk is new to the Killing Fields and Wenk did not sanction past indiscriminate and wholesale Montana Department of Livestock buffalo slaughters. Please try to help Wenk, as he faces the difficult task of educating VERY powerful enemies of National Parks, National Forests, public wildlife, endangered species, and the fragmented islands of necessary habitats and biological diversity our Nation’s priceless public lands Legacy contain.
PR’s Brief Bio:
As a journalist with more than 43 years’ experience in Western politics and resource issues, Paul Richards has served as editor or co-editor of three newspapers, newsman and editor for The Associated Press, and elections manager for The AP, UPI, ABC, CBS, CNN and NBC.
Richards founded and produced a successful radio news network; founded and hosted a political television interview program; founded and managed a news service for weekly newspapers; and authored a syndicated statewide political column.
Richards is a voluntarily-retired member of the Montana House of Representatives and a former candidate for the U.S. Senate.
Richards owns a leading consulting firm for nonprofit organizations, PR Media Consultants®, Public Interest Media Since 1968, near the community of Boulder, Mont.; works as a professional writer and editor; and contributes Dispatches from the Wildlands™, located at: http://blogs.alternet.org/paulrichards/ to AlterNet.
More Info:
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Dispatches from the Wildlands™ ©2011, Paul Richards
“In Wildness is the Preservation of the World.”
Henry David Thoreau
Paul Thomas Richards US Sen. Tester Slips Bill Calling for Mandatory Taxpayer-Subsidized Logging of Public Lands into Omnibus Spending Bill
Sets dangerous precedents for forest management, endangers wildlife, and amounts to a $140 million gift to the timber industry courtesy of taxpayers.
If you liked what President Barack Obama and his Secretary of Interior Ken Salazar did in the Gulf of Mexico: Leasing 53 million acres in the Gulf during Obama’s first year in office (more than any of his predecessors) and approving 5,106 oil drilling wells there, including 591 deepwater drilling rigs; all with no prior environmental analyses, no public participation, no environmental safeguards, and no restrictions or regulations; thereby creating the worst environmental disaster in the United States of America’s history — then, you’re going to love what Obama and his Secretary of Agriculture Thomas Vilsack have planned for the last surviving ecosystem in the U.S. outside of Alaska.
U.S. Senator Jon Tester (D-MT), strongly backed by Obama and Vilscak, has a bill that was written in secrecy by timber industry lawyers and timber industry lobbyists, a bill often referred to as the “Tester Wildlands Logging Bill,” that was unable to withstand scrutiny from the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee due to the financial and environmental costs of its Congressionally-mandated logging quotas, but has now somehow magically appeared on pages 893 to 942 of the 1,942-page $1.3 trillion Senate Omnibus Spending Bill.
An analysis of the spending bill headlined “Earmarkers Feast on Pork One Last Time Before Diet,” by The Associated Press, reads:
“The spending barons on Capitol Hill, long used to muscling past opponents of bills larded with pet projects, are seeking one last victory before tea party-backed GOP insurgents storm Congress intent on ending the good old days of pork-barrel politics. You might call it the last running of the old bulls in Congress.
In the waning days of the lame duck congressional session, Democrats controlling the Senate — in collaboration with a handful of old school Republicans — are pushing to wrap $1.27 trillion worth of unfinished budget work into a single “omnibus” appropriations bill.
Their 1,900-plus-page bill comes to the floor this week stuffed with provisions sought by lawmakers. It contains thousands of pet projects, known as earmarks, pushed by Democratic and GOP senators alike — despite a pledge by Republicans to give up such projects next year.”
Matthew Koehler, executive director of the WildWest Institute, called the sudden appearance of Tester’s Wildlands Logging Bill in the “must pass” appropriations measure that funds the federal government for 2011 “underhanded.”
“Let’s get this straight,” Matthew Koehler told the Great Falls Tribune on December 14, 2010. “Senator Tester’s bill never made it out of the U.S. Senate’s Energy and Natural Resources Committee, never made it to the floor of the U.S. Senate, and was never introduced in the U.S. House. It’s unfortunate that Senator Tester is pursuing such a questionable, and some might say underhanded, tactic to pass this bill. Clearly, if this bill was as great as Senator Tester says it is, he wouldn’t have to resort to this questionable 11th-hour strategy.”
Over the last two years, Tester has used six different names for his bill. Until Tuesday, it was known as the “Forest Jobs and Recreation Act.” But, it was inserted into the Senate Omnibus Spending Bill entitled the “Montana Forest Jobs and Restoration Initiative.” Whatever it is called, here’s what Tester’s bill does:
1. Designates 660,000 acres, or 6.6 percent to 7.3 percent, of eligible federal (Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management) roadless wildlands in Montana as Wilderness, depending on whose numbers are used.
2. Opens 92.7 percent to 93.4 percent of Wilderness-eligible federal roadless wildlands in Montana to roading, logging, mining, oil and gas drilling, and other industrial development (again, depending on whose numbers are used). Court action will likely determine if any of these roadless wildlands might remain protected under provisions of the Clinton Roadless Rule, the Obama Roadless Initiative, and the Montana Wilderness Study Act. Attorneys familiar with public lands laws disagree on whether or not Tester’s bill conveys what is termed “hard release” of 92.7 percent to 93.4 percent of Wilderness-eligible roadless wildlands. Hard release would exempt all roading, logging, mining, oil and gas drilling, and other industrial development upon these National Forest and Bureau of Land Management wildlands from all federal environmental, scientific, and public participation laws and regulations.
3. Removes more than one million acres of roadless wildlands (1.5 times the land mass of Rhode Island) surrounding Yellowstone National Park in southwest Montana’s Beaverhead-Deerlodge National Forest from the protections of the Clinton Roadless Rule, the Obama Roadless Initiative, and the late U.S. Sen. Lee Metcalf’s (D-MT) Montana Wilderness Study Act and opens them for to roading, logging, mining, oil and gas drilling, and other industrial development. Tester’s bill includes maps that reclassify these currently protected roadless wildlands to a new category, officially designated “Timber Suitable or Open to Harvest.”
4. Withdraws two entire mountain ranges, the Sapphire Mountains and the West Pioneer Mountains, from protection secured from legislation carefully shepherded through Congress in 1977 by the late U.S. Sen. Lee Metcalf (D-MT), a conservation champion.
5. Mandates the roading, logging, and development of more than two-thirds of the Sapphire Mountains and the West Pioneer Mountains. Only high-elevation “rocks and ice” barren tracts would be designated Wilderness. Of the 94,000 acres of public roadless wildlands currently in the Sapphire Wilderness Study Area, designated by Sen. Metcalf, only 53,000 acres would be protected from development. Of the 151,000 acres of public roadless wildlands currently in the West Pioneers Wilderness Study Area, designated by Sen. Metcalf, only 26,000 acres would be protected from development.
6. “Undesignates” the Axolotl Lakes Wilderness Study Area, Bell/Limekiln Canyons Wilderness Study Area, East Fork Blacktail Wilderness Study Area, Henneberry Ridge Wilderness Study Area, and Hidden Pasture Wilderness Study Area. These roadless wildlands would be subjected to “logging without laws,” as Tester’s bill specifically excludes logging them from protective provisions of the Federal Land Policy and Management Act.
7. Circumvents current National Forest planning laws, procedures, and regulations. Currently, the U.S. Forest Service is required to honestly and scientifically evaluate “site-specific impacts” of proposed logging. Under Tester’s bill, these requirements would be supplanted by a new system of “Landscape Scale Restoration Projects” where Congressionally-mandated logging would take place in the total absence of well-established forest planning procedures that require state-of-the art science, public information, and public involvement.
8. Congressionally mandates timber cutting levels, damn the environmental and financial costs. Instead of decisions being made at local levels by informed forest science professionals, Tester’s bill dictates a one-size-fits-all prescription that places logging above all other uses.
9. Prioritizes roading, logging, and other industrial development over all other uses. Under Tester’s bill, taxpayer-subsidized roading and logging are more important than anything else; be it elk hunting (which would diminish as elk security is logged away by Congressionally-mandated timber cutting), fishing (drastically debilitated by inevitable water degradation caused by unsustainable logging), steady supplies of clean irrigation water for agriculture (logging causes much faster watershed runoffs and dramatically increased sedimentation), pure community water supplies (many Montana cities get their water from nearby public roadless wildlands), diminished wildlife habitats, and the continued existence of numerous rare, threatened, and endangered species.
10. Promotes “logging without laws.” By Congressionally-mandating that timber cuts be placed above all other concerns, Tester’s bill would statutorily exempt roading and timber cutting on National Forest and Bureau of Land Management wildlands from the Clean Water Act, Endangered Species Act, National Environmental Policy Act (which Tester’s bill mistakenly calls the “National Environmental Protection Act”), Wilderness Act, National Forest Management Act (that governs National Forests), and the Federal Land Policy and Management Act (that governs Bureau of Land Management lands).
Tester claims environmental laws will be adhered to. The uninitiated believe him. However, the initiated know that when Congress mandates timber cutting quotas, federal courts have consistently held that Congressional mandates to cut down the public’s trees always trump federal environmental, public participation, and land use laws and regulations. While Tester’s and the timber industry’s public relations staffs lull the gullible into believing we can “get the cut out and still follow environmental laws,” the courts consistently rule that Congressionally-mandated cutting quotas are paramount to environmental and public participation laws.
This legal track record is available to anyone who can Google. Court precedents are clear: If a conflict in law arises, “the specific overrides the general.” That is, Congressionally-mandated timber cutting quotas preempt such laws as the Clean Water Act, Endangered Species Act, Wilderness Act, National Environmental Policy Act, National Forest Management Act, and the Federal Land Policy and Management Act.
11. Mandates taxpayer-subsidized timber cutting at least 5,000 acres per year until a total 70,000-acres have been cut on the Beaverhead-Deerlodge National Forest in southwest Montana. Forest Service employees and officials readily admit the roadless wildlands of the Beaverhead-Deerlodge National Forest are unproductive forestlands containing no commercial timber of any value.
The public wildlands that Tester and the timber industry want to log are east of the Continental Divide and therefore receive very little precipitation. Located on very steep, fragile mountainous slopes with little-to-no soil, minimal rain and snowfall, and extremely short growing seasons (30 to 60 days) due to high altitudes; the Beaverhead-Deerlodge National Forest’s trees are merely “sticks,” a term coined by Forest Service timber cruisers.
Trees 150 years-old might reach a maximum of ten inch diameters at the bottom. Since they taper considerably, if logged, they are incapable of producing anything except firewood and wood chips. Foresters know that high-altitude lodgepole pine-dominant forests are useless when treated as commodities. Logging trucks carrying these “sticks” bear from 110 to 150 trees in one truckload.
Due to these limiting factors, Tester’s bill, if not removed from the Omnibus Spending Bill, will cost the public at least $1,400 per acre to log its mandated 70,000 acres of the Beaverhead-Deerlodge National Forest and its mandated 30,000 acres in the Kootenai National Forest. “This $140,000,000 gift to the timber industry is nothing more than corporate welfare,” said Michael Garrity, an economist and executive director for the Alliance for the Wild Rockies.
12. Ignores historical timber cuts from the Beaverhead-Deerlodge National Forest. Tester claims that Congressionally-mandated and taxpayer-subsidized timber cutting will come from the Beaverhead-Deerlodge National Forest’s “suitable timber base” and that inventoried roadless areas are not threatened. But, Tester did not involve the Forest Service in any phase of his top-secret bill writing sessions with the timber industry. If he had, Tester would know that Forest Service foresters have established the Forest’s sustainable yearly harvest at a maximum of 500 acres. The most the Beaverhead-Deerlodge National Forest has ever cut, even during the housing boom, was 2,800 acres a year.
13. Congressionally-mandates a cut of at least 30,000 acres of prime grizzly bear habitat in northwest Montana’s Kootenai National Forest, causing disruptions that bear biologists say will force the rapidly-dwindling and endangered population of grizzly bears into insecure habitats, more conflicts with humans, and, ultimately, extinction. Much of the Kootenai National Forest already looks like moonscape from decades of overcutting.
14. Violates Tester’s 2006 campaign promises to “protect all of Montana’s remaining roadless areas.” “Senator Tester broke two campaign promises,” said Garrity. “When Senator Tester ran against Senator Burns, he promised to protect all roadless areas and not use riders for public lands legislation. Senator Tester’s rider opens up at least one million acres of some of the best elk hunting in the world to clearcutting. Thanks to Senator Tester we can kiss grizzly bears in the Yaak, the smallest grizzly bear population in the world, goodbye.”
15. Alienates Tester’s main supporters. In the November 7, 2006, general election, Tester defeated Burns by less than 1 percent of the vote, a razor-thin 3,562 votes. Conservationists provided the margin of victory that allowed Tester to defeat incumbent Sen. Conrad Burns. In tacking solely towards the timber industry, moneyed corporations that never previously supported him in any fashion, Tester has abandoned his true constituency.
16. Contains no Congressional mandates for any reclamation or restoration of roaded, logged, and developed National Forest lands and watersheds. If restoration is attempted, scientists believe it will likely fail, due to the high altitudes, steep slopes, no soil, minimal precipitation (east of the Continental Divide), extremely short growing seasons, and global climate change, which has already stressed high altitude forests to their breaking points (for example, high altitude species such as white bark pines and pikas are fast approaching extinction). Such extreme conditions create timber “mining,” rather than sustainable forestry.
17. Disenfranchises public lands stakeholders throughout the nation unable to personally attend on-site “resource advisory committees.”
18. Eliminates long-established Forest Service citizen participation procedures, including appeals of illegal and environmentally destructive roading, logging, and development.
19. Promotes the burning of forest biomass in power plants, a practice even more polluting than burning coal. Due to its low energy content, burning wood releases 1.5 times the carbon dioxide than burning coal to produce the same amount of energy. Carbon dioxide is a key component of greenhouse gases causing global climate change.
20. Encourages off-road vehicles, all-terrain vehicles, four-wheel-drive vehicles, and other motorized access into currently roadless Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management Wilderness-eligible wildlands.
21. “Undesignates” the Axolotl Lakes Wilderness Study Area, Bell/Limekiln Canyons Wilderness Study Area, East Fork Blacktail/Blacktail Mountains Wilderness Study Area, Farlin Creek Wilderness Study Area, Henneberry Ridge Wilderness Study Area, Humbug Spires Wilderness Study Area, Ruby Mountains Wilderness Study Area, and Hidden Pasture Wilderness Study Area. These roadless wildlands would be subjected to “logging without laws,” as Tester’s bill excludes their roading and logging from protective provisions of the Federal Land Policy and Management Act.
22. Overrides legitimate forest planning processes that involve full public information and participation.
23. Severely impacts at-risk, rare, threatened, and endangered species. Since the Tester bill Congressionally-mandates timber cuts, curtails forest planning and public involvement, and severely restricts the Forest Service from accurately assessing logging’s impacts; environmental protections provided by the Endangered Species Act will be preempted.
By forcing unsustainable industrial-scale logging upon our fragile public wildlands, Tester’s bill would irrevocably harm essential habitats of rare, threatened, and endangered species that characterize the wild nature of the northern Rockies, such as the gray wolf, bull trout, cutthroat trout (Montana’s official state fish), otter, mountain goat, mountain sheep, elk, arctic grayling, northern goshawk, boreal owl, pileated woodpecker, ferruginous hawk, Montana vole, sage thrasher, wild bison, peregrine falcon, bald eagle, pine marten, fisher, lynx, wolverine, and grizzly bear (Montana’s official state animal).
24. Ignores the scientific need to protect different elevation habitats and their dependent species. Conservation biologists have long understood the need to protect these different elevation habitats and dependent species with designated core areas, buffer zones, and connecting biological corridors, or linkages.
More recently, scientists have documented that forest habitats are changing radically, due to global climate change. The species depending on our National Forests for survival are increasingly stressed by climate change and are increasingly in need of broader migration opportunities.
25. Eliminates essential core habitats and severs connecting roadless biological and botanical corridors, or linkages, between the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem, the Salmon-Selway Ecosystem, and the Glacier/Bob Marshall Ecosystem.
Collectively, these ecosystems and connecting wildlands comprise the Northern Rockies Ecosystem. By fragmenting all of these public wildlands, Tester’s bill would spell the end of the Northern Rockies Ecosystem, the ONLY functioning ecosystem with all its native species remaining in the lower 49 states.
26. Extirpates wildlife species. Because the Tester bill overrides the Endangered Species Act, promotes “logging without laws,” and severely restricts Forest Service scientists from accurately assessing logging’s impacts, the public will never know the full extent to which at-risk secluded, rare, threatened, and endangered species will be adversely impacted. Species such as wolverine, pika, and pure strain cutthroat trout are already teetering on the brink of extinction.
27. Pretends there is a demand for timber. There is no demand for sawmills’ lumber. Tester’s bill is blatantly undisguised in its privatization of public resources and its forcing public assumption of private timber corporations’ extensive debts and liabilities.
A mere four corporations: Pyramid Mountain Lumber (Seeley Lake), Roseburg Lumber (Missoula), RY Timber (Townsend and Livingston), and Sun Mountain Lumber (Deerlodge) will receive the benefits of $140 million, with taxpayers picking up the tab in tax dollars spent, watersheds degraded, habitats lost, endangered species exterminated, and public wildlands destroyed. Tester’s bill is more corporate pork, plain and simple.
Editor’s Notes:
A Montana-based print and broadcast journalist with more than 42 years’ experience, Paul Richards specializes in Western politics and resource issues. CLICK HERE to read many postings from retired Forest Service officials and leading conservationists directly relating to this issue.
Dispatches from the Wildlands™ ©2010, Paul Richards
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MULTI-MULTI-MILLIONAIRE LAND DEVELOPER US REP DENNY REHBERG LEADS FANTASY LIFE AS A COWBOY!
ALTERNET EXCLUSIVE!
This week, U.S. Rep. Denny Rehberg (Far-Right-R-MT) will hold what are expected to be highly emotional “Wolf Impact Hearings” throughout western Montana. For masochists wanting to attend, Rehberg’s Congressional hearings are slated for October 5 in Dillon and Hamilton and October 6 in Kalispell. For specific site locations and lists of those testifying, click HERE.
Of course, the first person to testify at each and every hearing is Rep. Denny Rehberg himself. That’s OK. It’s his show. But, my beef is that Rehberg has officially listed himself as a genuine “Montana Rancher” from Billings.
Denny Rehberg is so very proud of being a “Montana Rancher!”
Check out the beginning sentence of Rehberg’s official biography from his Congressional Web site: “U.S. Congressman Denny Rehberg, in his fifth term representing the state of Montana, is a fifth generation Montana rancher.”
For two decades now, every Montanan has been exposed to countless photos of “Rancher” Denny Rehberg in his shitty cowboy boots, rolled up shirtsleeves, and absolutely perfect cowboy hats. The shit on the boots is because Montana ranchers are not stupid. They know full well that there is NO rancher, ANYWHERE in Montana that does not have shit on his or her boots.
As for the absolutely perfect cowboy hats, most ranchers restrict them solely to County Fairs and Rodeos. There is only one other exception: Genuine Montana ranchers MIGHT wear their absolutely perfect cowboy hats to basketball games, but ONLY with the following strict caveats:
1. No normal basketball games;
2. No preliminary rounds of the playoffs; and
3. IF, and only IF, their teams survive the preliminaries and actually make it to the Montana State Class B or Class C State Finals, THEN and only THEN will real Montana ranchers bring out their absolutely perfect cowboy hats.
The rest of the year, Montana ranchers wear their normal working cowboy hats. Around the ranch, into town, to the hardware store, to regular basketball and football games, school board meetings, even to bed, especially during calving season.
Montana ranchers’ normal working cowboy hats are uniformly dusty, dirty, sweaty, and, quite honestly, smelly.
But, not Denny Rehberg’s! His cowboy hats are always absolutely perfect and they never smell. And, because Rehberg wears absolutely perfect cowboy hats all the time in order to convince us that he is a genuine “Montana Rancher,” it is quite easy to discern he is not a genuine Montana rancher.
CLEARLY A “DUDE”
Clearly, Denny Rehberg is just a “dude.” Not California-speak “dude,” mind you. But, “dude,” in the original old-timer cowboy pejorative for a “dandy” or “city dweller.”
In fact, Rehberg is such a “dude,” he even buys and sometimes wears those incredibly expensive and embarrassingly tailored “Western” suits that no self-respecting genuine Montana rancher would be caught dead in. Actually, that is the ONLY time they wear their “silly suits”—in their caskets!
It’s sad when politicians buy into their own hubris. Rehberg actually thinks he is a rancher!!
There is just one small problem. Denny Rehberg is NOT a rancher! Rehberg is merely a pitiful cowboy wannabe.
In the real world, Denny Rehberg is a speculator, land developer, and subdivider. The reason he is one of the richest men in Montana and one of the wealthiest members of the U.S. House of Representatives is sheer, dumb luck and pure opportunism.
Through the years, Rehberg made his millions upon millions by chopping up his family’s once-authentic ranch into very tiny little bits and selling these tiny little bits to out-of-staters for astronomical prices.
Rehberg’s extensive land holdings have seen neither cow, nor bull, nor horse, nor calf since 1988. That is 22 years of all hat and no beef! Now, the actual verifiable electronic records only go back as far as 1993. But, that is still 17 full years of all hat and no beef!
“We were land rich, but cash poor,” Rehberg told a reporter two years ago, somehow maintaining a straight face. Sure, it’s good “pity-poor-me” false humility, but it is pure unmitigated bullshit; perhaps the only authentic bullshit Rehberg has had anything to do with for the last 17 to 22 years.
Time after time, Rehberg pulls his infamous, but ever-so-sincere, “Montana Rancher” con, with reporter after reporter, editor after editor. And somehow, over the last two decades, he hasn’t been caught!
Maybe Montana editors and reporters just aren’t that smart. They’ve unquestioningly bought into and echo-chambered Rehberg’s “pity poor me” “Montana Rancher” cornball spiel throughout the state for a full 20 years now. All the while, this “pity poor me” genuine “Montana Rancher” has been peddling “authentic” new “ranchhouses” at $1.7 million a pop, minimum.
Because Montana’s corporate-controlled (Lee Enterprises and Gannett) media have consistently remained asleep at the switch, most Montanans still actually believe Denny Rehberg is a rancher!
Adolf Hitler’s criminally brilliant propaganda minister, Dr. Paul Joseph Goebbels is reputed to have said “If you repeat a lie long enough, it becomes truth.” And: “The bigger the lie, the more it will be believed.”
So far, lying has worked quite well for Denny Rehberg. To date, Montana media fully subscribe to his genuine “Montana Rancher” Big Lie. To the best of my knowledge, Rehberg has never been correctly and accurately identified or described as a land developer and subdivider in ANY major news or wire service story over his last 17 to 22 livestock-free years.
This week, Rehberg will again unabashedly play his certified fifth-generation “Montana Rancher” card for all those unknowing saps attending his anti-wolf Congressional hearings this week in Dillon, Hamilton, and Kalispell. And, deprived of the truth, these unknowing saps will respect Denny Rehberg, because, after all, he is a genuine fifth-generation Montana Rancher. (If distasteful reality is allowed to intrude, the fourth-generation’s Jack Rehberg was actually a professional lobbyist for the oil industry).
It’s fun to play cowboy! This is Montana! Everybody loves ranchers! And, fifth-generation! Wow! To many, that means the Rehbergs were here before the Indians!
With no cows, no bulls, no calves, no horses, no NOTHING, except a whole bunch of two-million-dollar “ranchhouses,” Rehberg steadfastly insists he is a “Montana Rancher.” Election after election, Denny Rehberg has played the cowboy card and won, big-time!
For decades now, Denny Rehberg has successfully flimflammed Montana and national media with his carefully-crafted-burnished-and-targeted public relations scam, ultimately designed to warm the cockles of all hearts of steely Montana ranchers, claiming that he is one of them!
Every election, we Montanans who are grounded in reality ask: Are the corporate media editors and reporters really that stupid? Are they drugged? Sedated? Naïve? Numbed by alcohol or cynicism? Insane? Or, just plain sold out?
Where are the young and innocent to point out, as with “The Emperor’s New Clothes:” “Who is this clown parading around with no clothes on?” Or, in this situation, “Who is this so-called self-proclaimed ‘Montana Rancher’ that has NO livestock?”
Watch Montana and national media closely for the next month. See if they report the truth.
Or, will they relegate themselves to parroting the Company line: The so-oft-told-lie-that-it-is-now-Truth that a multi-multi-millionaire livestock-free land developer and subdivider can, every election season, somehow transmute into a genuine “Montana Rancher?”
Will reporters EVER ask Denny Rehberg, now that he has subdivided everything, exactly what does he ranch? Will they ask Rehberg to name ANY other genuine “Montana Ranchers” that have had neither cow, nor bull, nor horse, nor calf for 17 to 22 years?
It is clearly time for an intervention. Like most interventions, this hard love, although necessary, will prove difficult.
Montana’s servile corporate media have unwaveringly proven themselves incapable.
But, can’t someone somewhere end this insane collective delusion and directly ask Denny Rehberg the actual year that he STOPPED being a rancher? And, in the absence of ANY livestock for 17 to 22 years, doesn’t Rehberg feel just a little bit mendacious, hypocritical, or possibly even disingenuous, continually and ceaselessly promoting himself as a genuine “Montana Rancher?”
There has never been a better time for editors and reporters to undergo instantaneous conversions! Their now-vestigial inquiring minds that originally led them into journalism might be curious: In his fantasies, how many acres does Denny Rehberg ranch? How many dollars do Rehberg’s Fantasy Ranch and imaginary livestock gross? With Rehberg ensconced inside the Beltway, who manages his mirage?
Heck, let’s get it all out in the open, once and for all. Is Denny Rehberg’s Fantasy Ranch somewhere in a make-believe county or country that the rest of us don’t know about? What does Denny’s Fantasy Ranch produce? Fictitious cows with no saturated fats or cholesterol? Phantom emus? Ghost llamas? Pretend buffalo? Fabricated goats? Who knows?
If media allow Rehberg to perpetuate this decades’ long all-hat-and-no-beef flimflam, he will likely be reelected come November.
There has got to me ONE courageous editor somewhere who could sponsor a public questionnaire, poll, or contest between now and Election Day: “Where is Denny Rehberg’s Fantasy Ranch and what exactly does Denny actually do there, besides hate wolves?”
Maybe that oh-so-desperately-needed salt-of-the-Earth editor, still young and innocent at heart, will offer a prize (perhaps a REAL COW!!) for the most entertaining and believable response.
Dispatches from the Wildlands™ ©2010, Paul Richards
"Genuine Montana Rancher" U.S. Rep Denny Rehberg
Photo Courtesy of:
“Dump Denny Rehberg” Facebook Community
Paul Thomas Richards Should Congress Abandon 100 Years of Public Lands Protection to Open a Pandora’s Box of Special Loopholes, Corporate Subsidies, and Dictated Management that Statutorily Excludes the Public?
By: Dr. Stewart M. Brandborg, Executive Director (retired),
The Wilderness Society
I am a fourth-generation Montanan who grew up in a U.S. Forest Service family. Guy Brandborg, my father, served as Supervisor of the Bitterroot National Forest from 1935 to 1955.
I still fondly remember Gifford Pinchot, during one of his last western trips, visiting with my father in front of our fireplace. And, I still marvel at Bob Marshall’s one-day hike from White Cap Creek on the Selway River, up and over the Great Divide of the Bitterroot Mountains, and then down Boulder Creek just in time to join my family around the dining room table for supper.
After earning my Bachelors degree in Wildlife Technology in 1949 and my Masters degree in Forestry and Wildlife Management in 1951, I worked over 12 years as a wildlife biologist with the Forest Service and state wildlife agencies in Montana and Idaho. I then served as Assistant Conservation Director with the National Wildlife Federation in Washington, D.C.
I was associated over 20 years with The Wilderness Society, including 12 years as its executive director, from 1964 to 1976. I was privileged to advocate for the protection of our public lands legacy, presenting the case for wild land preservation across the Nation.
During my tenure, Congress passed landmark public lands legislation, including the Wilderness Act of 1964, creating our National Wilderness Preservation System. Since passage of the Wilderness Act, Congress has protected 110 million acres of publicly-owned wild lands as Wilderness.
We also laid the groundwork for the Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act, which, when ultimately enacted in 1980, protected as Wilderness over 56 million acres of public wild lands within our National Parks, National Wildlife Refuges, and National Forest system.
For more than 70 years, I have been involved with public lands issues.
With this background, it is with deep personal concern that I share reservations about Senator Jon Tester’s “Logging and Recreation Bill,” S. 1470.
This measure, if enacted, poses a serious threat to our National Forests. The Forest Service itself has determined the bill’s mandatory logging quotas to be unachievable, unsustainable, and unaffordable.
Senator Tester’s ill-advised bill was conceived in private and written by five logging corporations and a few conservation “collaborators.”
Deliberations purposefully excluded major players – the Forest Service, local county governments, watershed and irrigation interests, local and state land, wildlife, and wilderness interests, and a broad segment of other user groups – who have concern for the long-term protection of our National Forests.
The Tester Logging Bill undermines laws and administrative procedures that have served well to protect our Nation’s public estate. These laws and regulations require use of scientific management and public processes open to all citizens.
Objective review of the Tester Logging Bill brings these questions to mind:
1. Are Congressionally-dictated quotas for logging sub-marginal and uneconomic timber in the long-term interest of our National Forests and adjacent communities?
2. Does unsustainable industrial-scale logging of nonproductive federal lands offer the best employment for workers, when compared to sustainable forest and watershed restoration programs?
3. Instead of subsidizing roading and logging of fragile forestlands lacking commercial timber, could we better place our priorities upon the plentiful jobs provided by stream bank restorations, culvert maintenance, road obliterations and reclamations, habitat restorations, tree plantings, and selective thinning within designated community protection zones?
4. Should Congress abandon over 100 years of federal resource protection laws, set in place through bipartisan actions of 50 Congresses, and begin dispensing our National Forests to any interest group that gains the ear of any Representative or Senator?
5. Is it wise to set this calamitous precedent from which any member of Congress could dictate the exploitation of public lands, thereby severing our National Forest system into 535 separate Congressional fiefdoms?
6. Do we really want to open this Pandora’s Box of special loopholes, corporate subsidies, and dictated federal lands management that statutorily excludes the public?
In years past, Congress responded to overwhelming public sentiment to protect our National Forests from raids of special interest groups.
Now, we, the people of the United States, must again raise our voices to oppose this reckless attempt to break apart our National Forest system!
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Editor’s Notes:
This Op-Ed is derived from Dr. Stewart M. Brandborg’s extensive analysis of the Tester Logging Bill, published under the heading “Former Wilderness Society Chief Opposes Tester Wild Lands Logging Bill,” and available by clicking HERE.
Dr. Brandborg encourages other media to publish and post this Op-Ed. To obtain permission or further information, contact Dr. Brandborg at: 647 Foley Lane; Hamilton, MT 59840; Ph: 406-375-1122.
Many more details about the Tester Logging Bill, also known as the Tester Wildlands Logging Bill, are available throughout AlterNet’s Dispatches from the Wildlands and at the Web site of the Last, Best Place Wildlands Campaign.
Dr. Brandborg is the recipient of the “Robert Marshall Award,” The Wilderness Society’s most prestigious honor. He currently lives in western Montana’s Bitterroot Valley with his wife, Anna Vee.
Dr. Stewart M. Brandborg, Executive Director (retired), The Wilderness Society
Dispatches from the Wildlands™
©2010, Dr. Stewart M. Brandborg and Paul Richards
