Knowledge Fight Interactive Search Tool

April 10, 2014 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux

20:34

2661 The Truth About the Nevada Rancher's Standoff

Nevada Rancher Cliven Bundy is locked in a standoff with the federal Bureau of Land Management over illegal cattle grazing, endangered tortoises and property rights.

Large

Audio Only |

Scroll

Time	Text
	Hi everybody, Stefan Molyne from Freedom Main Radio.
	Hope you're doing well.
	Let us dive into the madness of the Bureau of Land Management sending 200 hyper-armed federal agents along with low-flying aircraft, massive cordoned-off areas of desert, helicopters and attack dogs, and taser-armed agents all for the tortoises.
	So what is going on in Nevada?
	Well, a rancher is having his herd of cattle confiscated because there's a 600,000 acre area under BLM control called Gold Butt, which is near the Utah border.
	Now, Nevada and Utah both have approximately 80 plus percent of their land under the control of the federal government, making it a little difficult to be a rancher around.
	Now, the desert in question is currently the habitat of the protected desert tortoise, and the land has been off limits for cattle since 1998.
	Now, five years before that, when grazing was legal, Clive and Bundy stopped paying federal fees for the right to graze there.
	He said that he didn't have to pay to graze his cattle on these lands because his Mormon ancestors had been working the land there since the 1880s, and that gave him the rights of the land.
	This is sort of a common law when you invest labor, when you enclose an area, when you use the land.
	It becomes yours.
	So he said, we own the land.
	He said, not...
	The Feds.
	He said he's willing to pay grazing fees, but only to Clark County, not the Bureau of Land Management.
	The herd is not only being thinned out, but the ranches themselves over recent decades have been significantly thinned out.
	According to Mr.
	Bundy, years ago I used to have 52 He said, I'm the last man standing.
	How come?
	Because the Bureau of Land Management regulated these people off the land and out of business.
	He really is the last man standing.
	Now, Nevada is, along with other states, attempting to wrestle some control of their own land back from the federal land ownership.
	This is a long fight.
	It goes back to the sagebrush revolution in the 1970s.
	So, in 1993, the BLM cut the grazing rights of Mr.
	Cliven Bundy, and he had a herd of thousands of heads of cattle, and they said only 150 heads of cattle are allowed to graze in this area to protect the species of desert tortoise that inhabits the same area of the state.
	So, this 150 head of cattle Would be spread out over 158,000 acres of land to which Bundy held the grazing rights.
	Now this is a tiny, tiny herd of cattle.
	Can't possibly disturb anything in 158,000 acres.
	And no plants, no animals, no tortoises would be impacted by this.
	And of course no rancher can make a living with that amount of cattle.
	So it's an absurd directive that basically means he can't Have cattle.
	He can't be a rancher around there, so he would join the 52 and there'd be 53 ranchers no longer in the neighborhood.
	You know, if you're in the government, it's a lot easier to manage land if you don't actually have any people on it.
	You know, then nobody objects to all the stuff that you're doing.
	And he doesn't want to give up his family's way of living that has been going on since the 19th century.
	Now, this sort of thing is going on all over the country in America.
	It's one of the reasons why the economy is so tough.
	The entire timber industry of Oregon was destroyed in the late 1980s in order to protect, and I say this in quotes, protect a subspecies of spotted owl.
	During the Carter administration in the late 1970s, the Tennessee Valley Authority was forced to modify or abandon billions of dollars in projects to protect the snail darter.
	Recently, this was just last year, desperate and near-hysterical farmers in Southern California had to watch their own crops wither and die as the federal government forced the state to just release more than 95,000 acre-feet of fresh water and let it flow to the Pacific Ocean in order to, quote, protect a subspecies of smelt.
	Now, am I just being snarky putting the word protect in quotes?
	I am not.
	The, um...
	The ESA, which is designed to protect the Endangered Species Act, designed to protect these species, has a success rate in actually protecting the species that it tries to protect of a little over 1%.
	So billions and billions of dollars of economic activity is destroyed.
	Tens of thousands of jobs are destroyed for a success rate of a little over 1%.
	But that would be the government for you now, wouldn't it?
	Here's the irony.
	This is all supposed to be to protect a tortoise, which the government is currently actively destroying and killing.
	So, throughout the housing boom in the 2000s, the Bureau earned enough to fund something called the Desert Tortoise Conservation Center.
	DTCC. Aren't you glad that you know that now?
	And this was in southern Las Vegas.
	So this was a habitat created to house these wild desert tortoises that were removed from the paths of developers, and they were going to breed them and use them to recover the species.
	And it had an operating budget of about a million dollars a year, which is...
	Quite a lot for 1,400 tortoises.
	Now, in the recession, the housing crash, the housing recession that followed dwindled the number of developers, and therefore they weren't paying these fines for disturbing habitats.
	It's a shakedown, really.
	And so what happened was the DTCC, the conservation area run by the government for the tortoises, Ended up turning some of them loose into the wild and euthanizing a lot of the others because they said, well, you know, we just don't have enough money to continue, so they can close down at the end of the year.
	From the AP, they say, back at the conservation center, a large refrigerator labeled carcass freezer.
	Hummed in the desert sun, a scientist examined the facility's 1,400 inhabitants to find those hearty enough to be released into the wild.
	Officials expect to euthanize more than half the animals in the coming months in preparation for closure at the end of 2014.
	So, it's really important for a few cattle to not disturb the tortoises in 160,000 acres But the government will euthanize 700 to 800 of these critters, even though they're endangered.
	So, this is the kind of madness that you have when you get massive government power involved in complex ecosystem questions.
	So, for more than two decades, This is what the BLM says.
	For more than two decades, cattle have been grazed illegally on public lands in northeast Clark County.
	This is a statement released by the BLM. BLM and the National Park Services have made repeated attempts to resolve the matter administratively and judicially.
	Impoundment of cattle illegally grazing on public lands is an option of last resort.
	See, this is what the government calls an attempt to resolve the matter administratively and judicially, which is give us all your cattle, which we will sell to pay the fines we imposed upon you to save and taught us that we are currently murdering ourselves or we will shoot your family.
	This is called a resolution of a dispute on the part of the government.
	It's the same way that a bully in the schoolyard resolves your dispute over your lunch money by punching you in the face until you hand it over.
	Oh, look!
	A resolution.
	BLM said in a statement the two judges ordered Bundy to remove his cattle from Gold Butt.
	The Center for Biological Diversity and Environmental Group said the federal action was long overdue.
	Ah.
	So a spokesman for this Center for Biological Diversity said, despite having no legal right to do so, cattle from Bundy's ranch have continued to graze throughout the Gold Butt area, competing with tortoises for food.
	What idiot thinks that cows and tortoises compete for food?
	Hindering the ability of plants to recover from extensive wildfires, trampolining rare plants, damaging ancient American Indian cultural sites, and threatening the safety of recreationists.
	Oh yes, those dangerous cows.
	Just hunting and cornering and ripping apart people who are out for a picnic.
	And of course, it's really important to know that government and quasi-governmental agencies, after a couple of hundred years of screwing Native Americans six ways from Sunday, are now very concerned about land issues and Native American sites.
	So this is all complete madness, as you can imagine.
	So, the Bundy herd of cattle at last count stood a little over a thousand, and again, to spread this out over 160,000 acres is not going to disturb any turtles.
	And, in fact, the cows are very helpful to the turtles on two levels.
	One, of course, they eat a lot of the foliage, and a lot of that, of course, is higher than the turtles, can reach a kind of low-down kind of creatures, of course.
	And as a result, it's less of a tinderbox.
	Like, it is a desert, it's very dry, and one thing that's quite common on government lands is massive and horrifying wildfires, because they don't allow small fires to burn, and also they don't allow grazing animals to strip some of the undergrowth, so that when there is a fire, it's just like a supernova.
	I mean, you might as well just set off a bomb in the woods or in the desert.
	So, they're going to thin out the foliage, resulting in fewer fires, and cows, as you may know if you've spent any time on a farm, basically empty out all of their four stomachs and produce pretty much, it seems like, more than the weight of a cow every day in cow manure, which is actually very helpful for the...
	The tortoises.
	And tortoises can eat the cacti, the wildflowers, herbs that cattle don't eat, and of course the recycled nutrients of the cows themselves.
	So it's not exactly an antagonistic ecosystem that they're talking about.
	The BLM released a statement on its website saying,"...cattle have been in trespass on public lands in southern Nevada for more than two decades." This is unfair to the thousands of other ranchers who graze livestock in compliance with federal laws and regulations throughout the West.
	The Bureau of Land Management and the National Park Service have made repeated efforts to resolve this matter administratively and judicially.
	So you see the fact that the government basically just used that Windows Paint program fill feature to go boink!
	We own all this land.
	We own 80% of Utah and Nevada.
	Boink!
	It's ours!
	Why?
	Stroke of a pen.
	We don't have to enclose it.
	We don't have to work it.
	We don't have to build anything on it.
	We don't have to plant anything on it.
	We don't have to graze.
	We've got the magic marker!
	Of public ownership.
	So we just make it ours!
	And suddenly you're trespassing on land that you and your family have worked for 150 years straight.
	Now the idea that this guy not wanting to pay artificial fees for unowned land that is merely claimed by a bunch of idiots in Washington, that this is unfair to everyone else, it's like, hey man, if you're not going to pay the mafia, that is unfair to all of the other shopkeepers in this neighborhood who pay the mafia.
	Madness.
	So, the federal government has shut down a scenic area about half the size of the state of Delaware to round up 900 cattle, it says, are trespassing on government land, which basically means unowned land, a piece of paper, a map, a film program, and a coercive shakedown.
	Now, they're killing all of these tortoises because they're closing down this tortoise center, which costs a million dollars a year to run.
	Now, they're spending three million dollars to round up all these cattle, which would keep these tortoises alive for another couple of years.
	And, again, this has got nothing to do with anything.
	Now, the situation where there's a real tinderbox, right?
	So you've got all of these hyper-militarized federal agents swarming all over this land.
	Clive and Bundy's son, Dave Bundy, 37, was arrested recently.
	Members of the Bundy family had gathered to film and take pictures of the removal of their cattle in an effort to document the event.
	According to reports, Dave Bundy was taking pictures and recording on his iPad when he was asked by federal employees what he was doing.
	Reports say that he told the BLM workers that he was exercising his First Amendment rights.
	See, that's a relief because those of us who understand the dangerous power of the state keep forgetting that he has a magic shield.
	Of words.
	It's a magic shield called the First Amendment rights, and they tried to, you know, they just go up and bump up against, oh wait, that's not how it happens at all.
	Well, what happened?
	Well, they released dogs, they threw him to the ground, and they actually, according to reports, were standing on his head.
	And he had a dozen officers on top of him, as well as dogs, so it was a real throwdown, and just tragic.
	There's also reports that Bundy's son, Ammon Bundy, was shot with a stun gun by law enforcement officers recently and that the rancher's sister was pushed to the ground.
	But the important thing is that the tortoises that the government are currently killing and that the cattle would only benefit are now safe from the ranchers.
	There are over 200 militarily armed federal agents using tasers and attack dogs to disperse protesters.
	Bundy said that the government has also brought everything but tanks and rocket launchers.
	He said they're carrying the same things a soldier would.
	Automatic weapons, sniper rifles, top communication, top surveillance equipment, lots of vehicles.
	It's heavy soldier type equipment.
	Now, I wonder why people who are anti-gun aren't out there saying that the government should disarm, because clearly this is a very dangerous use of gun.
	Oh, wait, that's right.
	Because being anti-gun is actually only being anti-private citizen gun.
	It's being very pro-government gun.
	Because when you disarm the population and arm the living hell out of the government, that just works out wonderfully throughout history, doesn't it?
	When his wife said that the roughly 200 armed agents from the BLM and FBI are stationed around their land, And when there was filming going on, there was film evidence that snipers were actually training their weapons on the Bundy family when they were filming the agents occurring.
	So this is a tragic and tinderboxy situation.
	And one thing that's important is, it is encouraging to those of us who are skeptical of the value of state power, it's wonderful to see the degree to which the government is willing to leap into action to protect a tortoise.
	That's fantastic.
	Don't you remember in 2008 when the Baxter class decimated about 40% of the wealth of Americans by cheating and lying and bribing?
	How the government leapt into action and pursued criminal charges against these forsters for the degree to which they were just ripping money out of the hearts of Americans and their homes.
	Oh, wait, no, that didn't happen at all.
	Well, I guess both tortoises and the financial industry must have donated a heck of a lot of money to the government.
	I mean, Barack Obama is basically only in power because he took so much money from the moneyed classes in terms of donations.
	He was the largest ever recipient of donations from the financial industry.
	So the government is really bringing the guns down on this rancher while basically not only not prosecuting any of the bankers involved in the rape of the American economy, but actually funding them to the tune of $700 billion plus as part of the TARP bailout.
	There's an old statement that says, Good fences make good neighbors.
	Where property rights are clearly delineated, human conflict, particularly aggressive conflict, diminishes enormously.
	There is no moral philosophical right To claim that which you do not homestead as property.
	Let's just say you just finished paying off your BMW and I suddenly say, oh, that BMW is mine and you now owe me $400 a month in rent.
	Otherwise, I'm going to come and take it by force.
	You'd be like, no, no, no.
	I'm the one who bought and paid for this car.
	You don't get to just arbitrarily extend your property rights to my property.
	But this is what individuals within the government claim the right to do.
	And this is the kind of catastrophes There's nothing sensible about this, because they're saying, look, he didn't pay his fines.
	But if he did pay his fines, or if he did pay his grazing rights, or his fines, then he would be allowed to go and let his cattle go here.
	And if he let his cattle go here, then according to the government, they would step on the tortoises and it would be tragic.
	So it's not about the money.
	It's not because he didn't pay the fines.
	They say he owes them a million dollars.
	He says he only owes them 300,000 or so.
	So it doesn't make any sense at all.
	The government's killing the very tortoises that they're claiming this whole action is designed to protect.
	So it's all nonsense.
	What it is, fundamentally, is political thrill-seekers, adrenaline junkies, cortisol junkies, seeking the high that they get from exercising violent power over other human beings.
	A wide variety of studies have shown that political power is more addictive.
	Coercive power over your fellow cognitive bipeds is more addictive than cocaine.
	So, So this is simply the actions of the political class exercising power over good-natured, productive people because that's how they get their kicks.
	It is like asking, why does somebody do cocaine?
	Because it's thrilling and exciting.
	Why are they exercising this power?
	It's a great game of screw you chess.
	And one of the things that is most tragic and most illustrative about this entire debacle It's the fact that the government has set up these zones.
	They're called First Amendment zones.
	And what they're allowing people to do, you see, is they put you in a little pen, a little kettle pen, and in that kettle pen you can protest.
	You can exercise your first men's rights to protest.
	Isn't that nice of them?
	In other words, if you're going out To protest against the government's arbitrary and destructive treatment of cattle farmers, the government will treat you as livestock with them as the cattle farmers, put you in a little pen, and give you the right to bleat into the uncaring wind all of your upset at how the government is treating you.
	So, this is where we've come to.
	The government is openly corralling and herding in citizens who wish to protest the arbitrary and unjust treatment of other citizens by the government.
	And this is where political freedom has decayed too, as predicted by libertarians, for about 6 billion years or so.
	Certainly over the last 150 years since classical liberalism, it has been predicted that the government will continue to grow until it collapses or there's significant pushback.
	So, these people who are so addicted to political power are going to continue to do this until they crash.
	There's almost no cure for addiction save the destruction of the source of the addiction.
	And that means that we have to lovingly take political power away from these addicts for the benefit, really, of humanity as a whole.
	This is Stefan Molyneux from Free Domain Radio.

▲