The conflict between the BLM and Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy
has laid bare evidence of deeply entrenched institutional racism.
No, I’m not referring Mr. Bundy’s awkward but
earnest effort to encourage people of all ethnic backgrounds to seek an end to
the suffocating embrace of government paternalism. I’m talking about the
fact that the Bureau of Land Management is an enforcement arm of a Regime that
continues to treat American Indians as “heathens” and “savages” with no rights
worthy of official recognition.
Like Cliven Bundy, Raymond
Yowell operated a small cattle ranch in Nevada, and refused to pay the
federal government grazing fees to which they are neither morally nor legally
entitled. In May 2002, the BLM mounted a
paramilitary operation to confiscate Yowell’s 132-head cattle herd for refusal to
pay grazing fees. The rustlers then billed the rancher $180,000, and began to
garnish his monthly Social Security check when he declined to honor their
impudent demand.
Yowell, 84, is
a former chief of the Te-Moak Band of the Western Shoshone tribe. His
ancestors were among the signatories of the 1863
Ruby Valley Treaty with the federal government, which recognized the tribe’s
sovereignty over a 24 million acre swath of western lands the Shonshone called
Newe Segobia – “The Land of the People of Mother Earth.”
As is the case with every such agreement, the federal
government acted in cynical bad faith, using the treaty to secure a foothold
within a territory slated for assimilation into the continent-straddling
behemoth being constructed through Manifest Destiny.
While demanding that the Shoshone refrain from interfering
with telegraph lines and stagecoach routes, the Feds did nothing to discourage
or deter illegal settlements on Shoshone land. In 1962 – one year shy of the
centennial of the Ruby Valley Treaty – the federal Indian Claims Commission proclaimed
that this pattern of federally abetted “gradual encroachment” by Euro-American
settlers and speculators had “extinguished” all Shoshone claims to their lands.
In the fashion of a rapist who offers to buy his victim
breakfast in order to re-fashion his crime into a “date,” the Feds offered to “compensate”
the Shoshones through a settlement amounting to fifteen cents an acre. This
figure was based on a valuation of the lands conducted in 1872 – long before
the discovery of significant mineral wealth on the property, which included the
Carlin
Trend, which contain North America’s largest gold deposits.
The Shoshones refused to accept the federal proposal. Those
in charge of the land grab bureaucracy replied with a “Sucks to be you shrug”
and “paid” the money to itself, insisting that this bookkeeping feint somehow
made the “transaction” legally binding.
At this point it’s worth remembering this pious utterance
by Commissar Harry Reid: “We can’t have an American people that [sic] violate
the law and then just walk away from it.” This is precisely how the purulent
Regime Reid serves acquired its supposedly legal claim to lands in the state he
supposedly represents.
The BLM was
correctly described as part of a criminal syndicate in a federal court ruling
last year in the case of Nevada rancher Wayne Hage. The agency displayed
its irrepressible criminal nature in its dealings with Raymond Yowell,
conducting an officially licensed rustling operation in defiance of a federal
injunction that the Shoshone chief won through a pro se appeal. But the
foundational assumption of federal Indian policy is that Indians have no
standing to assert their property rights. So Yowell’s legal victories did
nothing to restrain official lawlessness.
“I looked at it as an illegal seizure,” Yowell said of the
2002 confiscation of his herd. “They took cattle without a court order. Now
they are taking from my Social Security check.”
Before the BLM laid siege to his property, Yowell – like Bundy
– made
a futile appeal to his local sheriff for protection. For several years
after the BLM stole his livestock and deprived him of his livelihood, the
elderly rancher continued to petition the agency for relief.
“I kept writing letters to them saying I didn’t have a debt
with them, that I never signed a contract,” Yowell observed in an AP interview
three years ago. “But they just ignored it. There’s no use talking to them.”
Yowell has filed an appeal to the US Supreme Court. The US
Solicitor General’s Office is scheduled to file its response – most likely a
motion to dismiss the petition -- on June 4.
The Regime has the luxury of time: It can continue mulcting
the octogenarian victim’s Social Security checks while waiting for him to expire,
along with the residual legal claims made by the surviving Shoshones.
From the Regime’s point of view, all of this is a justified
exercise of “plenary” authority over Indian lands obtained through conquest of
an inferior race.
In the 1823 case Johnson and
Gram’s Lessee v. William McIntosh, the U.S. Supreme Court held that while
Indians “were admitted to be the rightful occupants of the soil, with a legal
as well as just claim to retain possession of it,” they were denied clear title
to their property – that is, the “power to dispose of the soil at their own
will, to whomsoever they pleased.”
Ownership of the land on which the Indians lived was
supposedly transferred from them to the newly arrived Europeans through royal
grants issued by monarchs acting on authority derived from the Pope. According
to the Court, those decrees by distant kings of whom the Indians had never
heard were sufficient to “convey the soil as well as the right of dominion to
the grantees.”
Henry Wheaton, who was the reporter for the Supreme Court at
the time of that ruling, later wrote that the Indians tribes, as “heathens,”
were “the lawful spoil and prey of their civilized conquerors” and that it was
a “maxim of policy and of law, that the right of the native Indians was
subordinate to that of the first Christian discoverer.” Arch-nationalist legal
commentator Joseph Story elaborated on this idea, describing the Indians as “infidels,
heathens, and savages [who] were not allowed to possess the prerogatives
belonging to absolute, sovereign and independent nations.”
A brief
filed on Yowell’s behalf observed that while cases subsequent to the 1823
Johnson decision “tended to omit explicit reference” to this doctrine of Christian
conquest, its core precepts did occasionally bob to the surface. Thus in the
1877 Beecher v.
Weatherby case, the Court decreed that Indians should be dealt with in a
fashion appropriate to “an ignorant and dependent race.” In 1946 – the year
Congress created the Indian Claims Commission to dispose of Indian land claims –
Justice Stanley
Reed batted away a suit filed by the Alcea Band of Oregon’s Tilamook tribe
by breezily stating that “discovery by Christian nations gave them sovereignty
over and title to the lands discovered.”
Nothing in the US Constitution justifies the
institutionalized assumption that the federal government had the right to act
as “trustee” on behalf of its so-called Indian “wards.”
The Supreme Court
struggled to find constitutional warrant for that belief in the 1886 case United
States v. Kagama. When the text refused to yield the desired outcome,
Justice Samuel Miller (a Lincoln appointee, natch) threw up his hands and
concluded that the plenary authority to regulate Indian affairs grew out of “the
ownership of the country … and the right of exclusive sovereignty which must
exist in the National Government, and can be found nowhere else.”
That ruling, one commentator wryly observed, introduced the “`it-must-be-somewhere’
doctrine of Constitutional interpretation.” Presumably the power to treat
Indians as dispossessed wards, like authorization for Obamacare, resides within
the
Constitution’s vast but inaccessible “Good and Welfare Clause.”
The “finders keepers” or “might makes right” approach to
Indian affairs “has never been repudiated,” notes
Yowell’s brief. “It is the continuing basis for all aspects of federal
Indian law.” The federal government insists that it is acting on “well-settled”
legal principles. The brief ripostes that “slavery and racial segregation were
considered `well-settled’ law, and were nonetheless subject to challenge as
fundamentally incompatible with the Constitution and the principles of respect
for human rights.”
About two years ago, the custodians of acceptable opinion
held an orgy of outrage over a
monumentally foolish essay published by Bryan Fischer of the American Family
Association, in which the author defended the subjugation of the Indians as
a legitimate exercise of “the right of conquest” by European settlers.
“The Native American tribes at the time of the European
settlement and founding of the United States were, virtually without exception,
steeped in the basest forms of superstition, had been guilty of savagery in
warfare for hundreds of years, and practiced the most debased forms of
sexuality,” Fischer opined. Since
Indians, on Fischer’s proudly ignorant reading of the relevant history, “resisted
the appeal of Christian Europeans to leave behind their superstition … for the
light of Christianity and civilization,” their dispossession by the federal
government was not only defensible, but morally necessary.
Many of the same bien-pensants
and self-appointed watchdogs who performed cadenzas of indignation over Fischer’s
foolish little screed are prominent defenders of the BLM in its confrontation
with Cliven Bundy, as the agency -- following the same premises as those endorsed by Fischer -- seeks to do to Bundy what it has done to Raymond
Yowell, the
Dann family, and other members of the Western Shoshone nation who have
sought to defend their lands.
The BLM is an indispensable element of the apparatus of
dispossession that invokes a medieval doctrine of racial superiority and
religious conquest to justify denial of Indian property rights. It continues to
scourge people officially designated as “lesser breeds without the
law.” And it enjoys the unqualified support of the same Progressives who
have dishonestly made Cliven Bundy a totem of intolerance.
Dum spiro, pugno!
10 comments:
Absolute criminals, backed by a mighty army and an ignorant, greedy populous have and are perpetrated/ing possibly the worst crimes in history. When I read an article like this it makes me wonder what my share of the punishment will be for having not stood fearlessly against them. Thanks for all of your work, Will.
What an amazing article!! Thanks to Bill Meyer for having the author on radio this a.m.
YOU nailed it! I tried to say it in a book, Jesus Wept, An American Story. https://www.facebook.com/JustAnotherSavage
The same cry of today's 'progressives', "the rancher must go, the cattle must go", is NO different the the battle cry my ancestors heard, "The Cherokee MUST GO!"
We ARE the current indigenous tribe, and what is happening to Mr. Yowell should disturb ALL Americans. Thank you for your outstanding work on this issue.
Just Another Savage
Scuttlebutt is that comrade kommissar potholder is going to approve drone strikes on ranchers. I guess they are not his people.
Just found this:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2615537/Dashcam-video-released-police-officer-witnesses-claim-jumped-car-hood-shot-teen-dead.html
swampfox the same can be said for any empire and make no mistake america is an empire just a shadow one while ancient empires proudly displayed there flag and intent america masks there intent with something else and wave the false flag of freedom.
To them the winners get all and losers can die the reason why the gove does anything to remain the winner
Never know what you will find on the net:
http://www.monacointelligenceservice.com/2014/04/land-grab-harryland.html
Mr Grigg,
Another superb and rage-inducing essay. Thank you.
To Anonymous @ 11:07 AM:
Please don't suppose that Harry Reid is one-of-a-kind. The article mentions the Carlin Trend. (Go re-read Mr. Grigg's reference.) Back in the 1980's, a tiny Canadian mining company called Barrick Gold tried unsuccessfully to get the lease from the BLM/Interior Department to develop a claim in that Nevada gold deposit. Perhaps due to the fact that the land really belongs to the Shoshone, the Interior Department refused their application all through the Reagan and Poppy Bush administrations. When Poppy Bush lost the election in November 1992, he fast-tracked the approval of the lease through the Interior Department and Barrick got their gold mine.
The value of the gold in that claim at today's prices is about $50 billion. How much did the lease cost Barrick, which they paid to the Interior Department, to be deposited in the Treasury of the United States for the benefit of each and every American citizen? Barrick paid the princely sum of $10,000. Yes, your eyes did not deceive you. Not a typo. Ten. Thousand. Dollars.
Bruce Babbitt, Clinton's Secretary of the Interior, who took office shortly thereafter, called it "The biggest gold heist since Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid." I kid you not - his very words.
Barrick today is the world's largest gold mining company.
But that's not the real end of the story. The kicker is that six months after leaving the Presidency, George Herbert Walker Bush, loyal and staunch Republican and the darling of 50 million Republlican voters, was retained by Barrick Gold as a "Consultant". How much of the $50 billion did he get? Well, nobody knows, because he was then, and is now, a private citizen, and not required to disclose his tax returns. What does G.H.W.B. know about gold mining? Well, nothing, except how to screw the American people out of $50 billion buckaroos (minus ten thousand dollars) of their wealth and siphon some of it into his own pocket.
So by all means pour scorn on Harry Reid. But save some for the Republican oligarchs on the other side of the aisles in Congress.
They are ALL a lying, thieving, murdering, filthy, vile, rotten bunch of vermin. All of them, Republican and Democrat. The whole Party-Politics Kabuki Theater in Washington is purely to keep us moronic assholes - you and me - preoccupied and fighting with each other while they screw us all - Republican voters and Democrat voters - up the ass. Without even some grease to lessen the pain.
(CONTINUED...)
(CONTINUED)...
And the Republicans say they need to cut Social Security and Medicare, into which I paid by forced deductions from my paycheck, and my employers paid, for 40 goddamn suffering years?
How about this: In 2008, Goldman Sachs declared to Wall Street and the SEC that they made a profit of $16 billion. (After getting a bailout of $8 billion from the US taxpayer - you and me - and the Federal Reserve.) NOTE: The Republicans complain bitterly to everyone who will listen that corporations in America are taxed more than anywhere in the world - a tax rate of 55%. So how much tax did Goldman Sachs pay to the IRS and into the US Treasury in 2008? After their $8 billion gift from the taxpayers? They paid $14 million in tax. Fourteen million dollars. Less than one-tenth of one percent. (What happened to 55% tax rates??? How much percent do YOU pay in tax? Or me? Us pathetic jerks? In my case, about 27%. But hey, $14 million was a lot - Verizon got a tax refund!) $14 million is about a third or less of the take-home pay in 2008 of Lloyd Blankfein, the CEO of Goldman Sachs. So he got three times as much as the Treasury, which donated $8 billion to his company. A gift from you and me, taxpayers one and all. Did you ever know you were such a generous guy?
How did they do it? Because it is perfectly legal for publicly traded corporations to keep TWO sets of books - one for the SEC and Wall Street, and one for the IRS. Trust me - I was an accountant for 40 years, and I know.
And why is this still legal, in these days of budget deficits and screw-the-poor-and-hungry-slobs America? Well, try this fact on for size: The largest contributor to Barack Obama's campaign in 2008 was - hold on to your seat - cue the trumpet fanfare - Goldman Sachs!
Heard enough yet, or shall I continue?
Does your asshole hurt yet, or can you take some more abuse from our lords and masters, both Republicans and Democrats?
Try a little K-Y jelly, it might ease the pain.
- Lemuel Gulliver.
PS: "This land is your land, this land is my land..." etc. etc. And the Tooth Fairy still goes out on dates with the Easter Bunny.
Liars, thieves, and murderers. The state has mastered its' craft.
You really are a terrible writer, Willy. It's no wonder you can't get a job.
To Lemuel Gulliver:
Blankfein et al are 'doing God's work', a direct quote.
In the upside down world of today, the corruption, crimes and all the fallout you list are, according to Blankfein, now "God's work".
It is time for all to end.
Post a Comment