What’s Really Going On In Oregon

®™©

What’s Really Going On In Oregon

And who are the real' illegal occupiers?

By de Andréa,

Opinion Editorialist for  
‘THE BOTTOM LINE’  

Published February 11, 2016

Now that the so-called occupation of government land in Oregon is officially over,  one must understand what was really going on in Oregon – which actually began in Nevada -  More importantly, one must understand what the  Bureau of Land Management (BLM) is, and the evolution of how it came into being.

Who and what is the BLM and is it even legal?

Ed Abbey called it the "Bureau of Livestock and Mines." Less creative writers call it the "Bureau of Land Mismanagement." It sometimes calls itself "the nation's leading conservation agency." Whatever you call it, the Bureau of Land Management illegally owns more of your land than is owned privately. Especially in the Western U.S.

It may also be true that, as a Sierra Club book once said, BLM lands are the "lands no one knows," then the BLM itself is the agency no one knows.

People active in public land issues know that the BLM itself owns and manages more than 264 million acres of land—most of all the land west of the Mississippi is in one way or another illegally owned by the Federal Government not by the people or the states as Constitutional Law requires.

So-called government BLM land is the land "left over" after homesteaders, timber companies, land developers, states, the Forest Service, Park Service, and other private parties and public agencies took the lands they wanted. The Bureau also owns the mineral rights on both its land and most other federal lands.

Each of these illegal encroachments on the 10^th Amendment of U.S. Constitutional law represents a bit of evolutionary pork, a favor Congress handed out to some special interest at the expense of every free American--and, often, with a serious environmental cost as well. Yet the agency remains largely unknown to the average ignorant brainwashed American.

As in any criminal government agencies, there is no oversight, no one even knows or keeps track of revenues vs. expenses. This is not surprising, since Congress has always focused on physical outputs rather than efficiency or profitability. This has allowed the Bureau to become wasteful and inefficient. Even if physical outputs were an appropriate goal, those outputs could be produced at a far lower cost by the states themselves.

History of the BLM

The BLM was created in 1946, when the Department of the Interior merged two older agencies: the General Land Office, created in 1800 to sell off the public lands and encourage settlement; and the Grazing Service, created in 1934 to manage grazing on public lands. The conflicting mandates of land disposal and land stewardship contributed to a schizophrenic nature that remains to this day.

The General Land Office

The General Land Office's man-date was to dispose of the hundreds of millions of acres the federal government had acquired from treaties with Indian tribes, English land grants, and other land deals. The very first branch, located in Cincinnati, gave western settlers access to auctions of public domain land that had previously been held in New York City and other eastern ports.

The Grazing Service

Outside the national forests, homesteading and unrestricted livestock use on public domain lands continued unabated until the passage of the Taylor Grazing Act of 1934, which directed the Secretary of Interior "to stop injury to the public grazing lands by preventing overgrazing." The secretary created the Division of Grazing (renamed the Grazing Service in 1939), complete with "regional grazers" to complement the Forest Service's regional foresters. Like the Forest Service, the Grazing Division was established to bring order from social chaos and to impose controls on public land grazing.

The 1946 debates over the Grazing Service led the Secretary of the Interior to combine that agency with the General Land Office to form the Bureau of Land Management. The BLM inherited the Grazing Service's mission of managing the public domain while it was still public and the General Land Office's mission of disposing of the public domain. In the eyes of the cattlemen, it was a temporary agency only necessary until they could gain title to the public domain.

The BLM and Minerals

The United States initially leased, then sold, minerals on lands it held in the east. The 1848 discovery of gold in California, however, caught the United States without a general mineral policy in the West. Miners developed their own laws and regulations, organize mining districts, devise rules to determine how claims were staked and titles held, and enforce these in miner courts.

BLM and Forestry

The BLM's largest timber holdings are on Oregon and California (O&C) lands. These lands had been granted in 1866 to the Oregon and California Railroad Company for construction of a railroad from Portland to San Francisco. The company, which only reached the Oregon border, ignored the conditions of the land grant--that lands be sold to actual settlers in 160-acre parcels for no more than $2.50 per acre--so in 1916, Congress illegally revoked title to nearly 3 million acres of the grant. In 1919, the federal government illegally reclaimed another 93,000 acres from the nearby Coos Bay Wagon Road Grant.

So how does this all relate to the Oregon and Nevada land occupation?

First a sequential report on the major confrontations in Oregon:

January 4, 2016: The Hammonds report to prison in California, even though the Hammond’s had already served their original sentences resulting in double jeopardy and violating their Fifth Amendment rights. Their attorney announces that they'll seek pardons from President Barack Obama.  During the original trial the Hammonds Sixth Amendment rights were violated when a witness for the defense was not allowed.  The witness saw the BLM set fires that burned over to the Hammonds property.

January 5, 2016: Robert 'LaVoy' Finicum, an Arizona rancher often serving as spokesman for the occupiers, says he believes there's a warrant for his arrest and tells reporters: 'I'm not going to spend my last days in a cell. This world is too beautiful to spend it in a cell.'

January 6, 2016: Cheers erupt at a community meeting in Burns when the appointed not elected Harney County Sheriff Dave Ward who previously worked for the BLM, says it's time for the occupiers to 'pick up and go home.'

January 7, 2016: Ward and two other sheriffs meet with Bundy and other occupation leaders at a remote intersection, but nothing is resolved.

January 11: 2016: The occupiers announce they're going through documents and accessing computers used by employees at the refuge. They tear down a stretch of government-erected fence, saying they are giving a local rancher access to the preserve.

January 19, 2016: Several hundred people rally in Portland — about 300 miles north of the remote refuge in southeastern Oregon — to demand that Bundy end the occupation and to note that federal management makes it possible for all kinds of people to enjoy public lands.

January 20: 2016: Oregon Gov. Kate Brown says she's angry that federal authorities have not yet taken action against the occupiers and that she plans to bill the U.S. government for what the standoff has cost Oregon taxpayers.

January 21, 2016: Bundy goes to the airport in Burns where federal officials have set up a staging area and, with reporters watching, speaks on the phone with who is apparently an FBI negotiator.

January 23, 2016: Occupiers hold an event at the refuge for ranchers to renounce grazing permits.

January 26, 2016: Bundy and other occupation leaders leave the preserve to hold an evening meeting in a town about 100 miles north of the refuge. The FBI and Oregon State Police move in to make arrests on a highway, resulting in a confrontation that leads to the killing of Finicum. In the following days, three more arrests were made.

January 28, 2016: The FBI releases an aerial video of the fatal traffic stop. Authorities say it shows Finicum reaching toward a loaded gun before police shoot him.  Question was: how did the police know it was a gun.

January 29: 2016: Ammon Bundy, his brother Ryan Bundy, Ryan Payne and five others appear in federal court in Portland, where a judge denies their release.

February 1, 2016: Four holdouts remain at the refuge and say they want to be allowed to go without arrest. Bundy calls for them to leave.

February 10, 2016: The FBI surrounds the last four occupiers as the holdouts argue with a negotiator and yell at law enforcement officers in armored vehicles to back off.

 

February 11, 2016: The remainder of the so-called government land occupiers surrender to the FBI and local police. 

 

As I said this all started in Nevada

In the case of The United States v. Bundy played out over many years in the United States District Court for the District of Nevada, involved court orders, injunctions, and notices.

 

Bundy argued pro se (without a lawyer) that the land belongs to the state.

 

The Bureau of Land Management was represented by the U.S. Attorney's Office and the United States Department of Justice. District Judge Larry R. Hicks ruled that the land on which Bundy was grazing his cattle was indeed owned by the federal government, and that Bundy had not been paying to use it as he should have been, that Bundy was trespassing, and that the government had the right to enforce the injunctions against trespass.

 

But the Question is: What are the rights of government to own land?

 

As noted in my Article titled “Is The BLM Good For America?” I included the Constitutional law regarding the Federal ownership of land.

Here is the law: (Art I, Sect. 8, and Clause 17) of the U.S. Constitution.

"To exercise exclusive legislation in all cases whatsoever, over such district (not exceeding ten miles square) as may, by cession of particular states, and the acceptance of Congress, become the seat of the government of the United States, and to exercise like authority over all places purchased by the consent of the legislature of the state in which the same shall be for the erection of forts, magazines, arsenals, dockyards, and other needful buildings." (Emphasis Mine)

Not only was there no consent of the states to purchase state land, but the BLM has nothing to do with “…the erection of forts, magazines, arsenals, dockyards, and other needful buildings,” for the operation of the Federal Government as the U.S. Constitution requires.

 

So to answer the question: Is the existence of the Federal Bureau of Land Management (BLM), even constitutionally legal?

A big fat red NO ‘, my constitutionally challenged Americans!

Below is a map of the lower 48 states as well as inserts of Alaska and Hawaii, and unless one is totally color blind one can easily see what the Federal Government illegally owns.  It’s all the land in RED my friend. 

Nearly the entire Western United States is illegally and unconstitutionally owned and occupied by the Federal Government and controlled by the BLM or other Federal Government agencies.

As one can easily see from the map above, the Federal Government illegally owns and controls more than 90 percent of the state of Nevada, more than 65 percent of the state of Oregon, 80 percent of the state of Utah, and so on!  The anti-constitutional criminal oppressive Federal Government illegally owns, occupies and controls approximately a third of the land in the continental United States.

THE BOTTOM LINE: Like most government agencies that exist today, the BLM and the possession of land not needed to run the government is constitutionally illegal.  Most government agencies simply evolved from other agencies which in themselves are questionably legal in the first place.  An example would be the original ATF.  A tax collection agency, which was originally extension of the IRS for the collection of such questionable ‘Special Taxes’ on alcohol, tobacco, and fire arms.  Now known to have evolved into the BATFE and a Military Organization.  All of which is a violation of the Tenth Amendment among other Constitutional laws.

If one were to do a study on the constitutionality of all the Federal government agencies one would soon find that the vast majority of the Federal Government itself has done nothing but illegally evolved from a limited Constitutional Central government, (the historical intention and letter of the Constitutional Framers and Architects) into a an out of control militant autocracy.

But then who in America even knows anything about the U.S. Constitution, or much less, even cares anymore.  After all it’s just an old out dated document that use to guarantee the God given rights of every American.   

 

Are Liberty and Freedom just an old out dated idea of the past???

Thanks for listening - de Andréa

Please pass on this article to everyone on your email list.  It may be the only chance for your friends to hear the truth.

Copyright © 2014 by Bottom Line Publishing, All Rights Reserved -  Permission to reprint in whole or in part is gladly granted, provided full credit is given.

Disclaimer - The writer of this blog is not responsible for the language or advertisements used in links to referenced articles as source materials.