Roger,
I did miss that. Thanks.
Carl Jarvis
On 8/3/17, Roger Loran Bailey <rogerbailey81@xxxxxxx> wrote:
You missed a point, Carl. You said that they should either pay the fees
or get busy changing the law. They were paying the fee though. The
government just arbitrarily revoked their permit anyway. That meant that
the fee was no longer accepted and the grazing was no longer allowed.
On 8/3/2017 1:24 AM, Carl Jarvis wrote:
An interesting point of view. On the one hand, I can agree that if
the cattle are not running pipelines across the land, or cutting down
the timber, or building private golf courses, then why not allow them
to graze? I've seen cattle on vast stretches of near desert land. No
one is going to do anything that can harm this land simply by grazing.
But I fail to see the connection with this situation and the Corporate
Capitalist. The land in dispute is public land. If the government
has laws regulating who can use this public land, and there is a fee
for such uses as grazing, then either pay the government the fees or
get busy changing the laws. Anyway, I can't make a connection. If we
tossed out the current Ruling Class, and installed a Socialist
government, how would that change the question about who can use the
land for what purposes?
Now if the Capitalist Government allowed oil drilling or fracking, or
any private commercial project that disrupted the land and put money
in private pockets, I would agree that it could be pointed out that
this was a gross misuse of the land, for private gain.
Carl Jarvis
On 8/2/17, Roger Loran Bailey <dmarc-noreply@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
http://themilitant.com/2017/8129/812953.html
The Militant (logo)
Vol. 81/No. 29 August 7, 2017
(As I See It)
Defend the Bundys! Defend ranchers’ access to
public land
BY JOEL BRITTON
OAKLAND, Calif. — “In Defense of Ranchers’ Rights to Graze Cattle on
Federal Lands” was the topic of the Militant Labor Forum here July 21.
This writer was the speaker, on behalf of the Socialist Workers Party.
On July 17 Dennis Richter, from Los Angeles, and I attended the opening
day of the frame-up retrial in Las Vegas of Scott Drexler, Richard
Lovelien, Eric Parker and Steven Stewart, four men who participated in a
protest three years ago demanding that Cliven Bundy’s cattle be freed
from federal government impoundment. A number of other people who joined
the protest, including Bundy and two of his sons, are in prison pending
later trials on related charges.
This past spring a jury in the same courtroom had been unable to find
the defendants guilty. The charges included “assault on a federal
officer,” “threatening a federal law enforcement officer,” “interstate
travel in aid of extortion,” and “conspiracy to commit an offense
against the United States.” Judge Gloria Navarro declared a mistrial of
the four, while two others were convicted on some of the charges.
The Bureau of Land Management seized 400 of Bundy’s cattle near his
Bunkerville, Nevada, ranch in April 2014, and was preparing to take them
to California and sell them. They claimed to be acting in defense of the
environment, with court decisions backing them up.
The fact is the Bundys — like most farmers and ranchers — pride
themselves on being stewards of the land, on which their livelihoods
depend.
Hundreds of ranchers, family members and other supporters from all over
the western United States rallied in defense of the right of the Bundys
and all ranchers to graze their cattle on lands controlled by the
federal government.
Federal agencies control nearly 87 percent of the land in Nevada. For
generations Bundy family members paid grazing fees, until BLM
bureaucrats arbitrarily limited Cliven Bundy to grazing 150 head on the
land. He decided to ignore the order and continued to graze his cattle
as his family had done for decades. By 2014, the family faced $1 million
in unpaid fees, fines and interest, and a series of court orders to stop
using federal lands near his small 160-acre ranch.
Following a tense standoff between the heavily armed Clark County
police, sheriffs and BLM cops on one side, and Bundy family members and
their supporters, a few of whom were armed, on the other, the cattle
were released. As Lovelien’s attorney Shawn Perez said in his opening
statement at the trial, “Not a shot was fired, not a bottle was thrown,
not a rock was thrown.” Not by Lovelien, any of the other defendants or
any other supporter of the Bundys.
After this victory, Democratic Sen. Harry Reid, at that time the
majority leader in the Senate, threatened, “It’s not over!” And sure
enough, the FBI went to work to cook up “evidence” for frame-up charges
against Bundy, the current defendants and others. The defendants have
been denied bail while awaiting trial.
When the prosecutors failed to get the four defendants convicted last
spring, they pressed for a new trial and got Judge Navarro to bar
defense attorneys “from referencing constitutional rights to freely
assemble and to bear arms,” and “from mentioning alleged misconduct or
excessive force by law enforcement,” as they did successfully in the
earlier trial.
Working people should stand with the Bundys and the other defendants.
The day before the trial began, Richter and I knocked on doors in a
workers’ neighborhood in Las Vegas near the Nellis Air Force Base.
“We introduced ourselves as members of the Socialist Workers Party,
explained our revolutionary perspectives and reported on protests in
defense of the Bundys and the other defendants party members had
attended the day before,” said Richter. “The four workers who we had the
chance to speak with at length said they had heard about the ranchers’
protests and the trials. They expressed their solidarity and all got
copies of the Militant.”
We explained, and I repeated it at the forum in Oakland, that a fighting
alliance between workers and independent producers such as ranchers and
farmers is necessary to end the dictatorship of capital and to make the
revolutionary changes needed in this country. “The logic of workers,
farmers and ranchers fighting in our interests — against the wealthy
capitalist rulers and their government — is to mobilize in our millions
to take power, to establish a workers and farmers government,” I told
the forum.
Such a government would ensure that ranchers are able to continue to
make a living and act as guardians of the land and the environment as a
whole.
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