Outrage in Montana newsmax.com
Diane Alden
Saturday, Jan. 11, 2003
Every time I think I have seen it all, I find I have not seen the half of it.
Every time I think our federal bureaucracies and flunkies can't get any more tyrannical, I am proven wrong.
Every time I think a change in administrations and political parties will redirect this nation, I find nothing has changed.
Every time I think the court system will deliver justice, I find it is not necessarily so.
Thanks to activist leftist courts appointed by a series of presidents, none of whom have any respect or appreciation for the U.S. Constitution or Bill of Rights, the outrage continues.
Courting Injustice
I have to ask, How dumb are we as a nation and a people? How apathetic are we? How much insanity will we be forced to stomach from the court system?
Do we Americans have any appreciation for our fellows who are the rural working class and the poor?
That includes the poorest of the poor on Indian reservations and the growing numbers of white poor being put out of business in the backcountry of America.
Meanwhile, our rich urban elites, located in diverse places like D.C., New York and San Francisco, make public policy for everyone, urban and rural alike. The insanity, however, is that many of them do it by litigating and using federal grants and largesse to destroy their fellow countrymen, the rural poor.
Our Congress and executive branch, scared spitless by these reactionary elites, only offer mild resistance to this injustice.
The collectivist rich and powerful, like the Sierra Club, Wildlife Fund and Nature Conservancy, are killing this nation. So are those who demand racial quotas and preferences and unlimited immigration or illegal immigration.
We are building a feudal system. Along with it comes an elite oligarchy that manipulates and uses its special-interest clientele by promising special treatment or funds. That system is becoming the dominating political, social and economic force in the United States today. There are few who seem able or willing to stop it.
Somewhere in Montana
I have been to Libby, Montana. I have to been to Troy and Dixon and other small Montana towns where only one road connects one with the other. It is the beautiful backcountry of the Intermountain West. It is a place where the success of the girls' basketball team makes headlines. It is a place where people drive miles to eat at a local restaurant and attend church.
In the flat badlands of eastern Montana you may find yourself speeding carelessly on the straight-pin roads. But in the western part, near Libby, you can't drive very fast. The curves and mountainous terrain won't let you. Besides, the beauty of it takes your breath away and driving fast is the last thing on your mind.
So why am I hot about what is going on in Libby, Montana?
Every once in a while I get one of those reports or e-mails that make me throw papers across the room and cuss the stupidity and cupidity of the federal green bureaucracies, the courts, the greens and the callous people who run them.
Every once in a while some leftist court proves once again that the U.S. Constitution does not mean a thing to it.
Every once in a while the environmental movement establishes one more time that it is about money, power and driving rural people out of their homes and communities. They do so in order to impose some weird collectivist garbage like the Wildlands Project.
They attempt to impose on everyone a cult-like belief that nature is a superior good to all others, especially nature totally untouched by man.
In fact, green concern is rarely about what is best for the environment. Certainly their failure to rely on any kind of peer-reviewed science in their worship of nature is part of the equation. But what they do best is claim power and control through the courts. They are sue-happy. It is such an easy way to make a dishonest buck.
I have done a lot of cussing this week. The area around my desk is littered with papers flung in frustration and anger.
Why am I so bent? Someone pointed out to me this week that not only do rural types have to worry about unjust and stupid failures of our national environmental policy and the green warriors, but now they are subjected to the imposition of political correctness as well.
In that regard, remember that justice is supposed to be colorblind. It is not supposed to be concerned with the ethnicity or sex of individuals. It is not supposed to give advantage to one group over another.
Nonetheless, the imposition of racial preferences for preferred minorities is alive and well and living in Montana – and everywhere else. The fact is, godlike despots inflict unconstitutional rulings on the citizens of this country in a steady stream of bad court decisions
It forces us to ask, Which part of the U.S. Constitution makes one group more important and special than any other group? Whatever happened to equality before the law? Whatever happened to simple justice?
I received an e-mail from someone about a case that Mountain States Legal is handling. It made me mad and I didn't think I could get angry on enviro issues any longer.
I thought I had burned out on all the wackiness, cruelty, stupidity and bold lawlessness that environmentalism and environmental law had become. I thought I didn't care that the courts and Congress and the executive branch are in cahoots with elite greens or at best are afraid of them.
Dealing with green politics and race-baiting warriors is like dealing with an insane kangaroo. It just hops around taking swings and kicking at anything that stands in its vicinity. The only thing that slows it down is to marginalize it, lock it up or keep it tranquilized in some fashion.
The feds have chosen the last course. They tranquilize these entities, the mad kangaroo, by giving them a payoff out of the federal treasury or special treatment and racial or ethnic preferences.
Racial Preferences in Libby
Libby is located in logging and mining country in northwest Montana. I understand both industries because northern Minnesota, where I currently reside, has plenty of both.
It is not an easy life. It does not make anyone rich. However, what keeps people at it is the love of the land, of nature and most of all a way of life. In rural America, what the market and nature don't do to kill you off, the government, greens and now the race warriors will accomplish. Group identity now trumps the U.S. Constitution and the rule of law.
Libby is a town of about 8,000. In October it received some bad news. One of the major employers, Stimson Lumber Company, told the town that Stimson would be closing the mill, putting 300 people out of work.
The reasons for this action include the fact that the U.S. Forest Service and the federal government will not allow enough timber to be cut to make it profitable for Stimson to continue.
In addition, the feds are constantly paying for environmental lawsuits, which drives up the price of the lumber that is allowed to be cut, thus making it an unprofitable and un-economical form of making a living.
Contrary to what the greens say, logging on public lands makes money. But the feds spend more than the amount brought into the federal treasury from logging by giving it to environmental education or to greens for inane "studies."
Some of the money is spent to employ girly guides from the University of California who tell campers that loggers and ranchers are raping the environment and should be made to get other jobs. This form of abuse of rural people has been documented in many of our parks and public areas.
In any event, it has become cheaper to buy logs and lumber from Canada or the Far East than to cut timber in the U.S. Who needs the aggravation from Greta Green Britches and Sierra Sue Happy when you can get lumber from places that are not under the hypnotic spell of the Sierra Club and her clones?
Most of the price increase in our timber products harvested from feudalized federal lands is because groups like the Sierra Club make a fine living suing the government. After all, it has a brigade of trial lawyers and high-priced lobbyists to feed.
A couple of years ago the Libby area had a chance to add high-paying jobs when a mining company sought to move into the area. Again the greens prevented it. Along with the uncaring members of the Clinton administration, all the jobs and what those jobs would bring to the community were deep-sixed when mining permits were denied.
Obviously, the Clinton cabal knew which side its green bread was buttered on. The collusion between collectivists like Clinton and the greens was and is a common practice.
According to Mountain States Legal, the economic bright spot after Stimson announced its closing was that the federal government would be hiring those displaced by the demise of Stimson.
The EPA needed 200 to 300 employees to address asbestos problems in Libby's buildings. In addition, Bush's forest health initiatives, regarding proper and sensible forest management, would have employed another hundred residents of Libby. Good deal, you say? Think again.
These new jobs are not going to go to the dislocated folks of Libby, Montana. Nope!
When the locals applied at the EPA office in Lincoln County, they were turned away. The EPA told them that they were not qualified. Not because they don't know the job or couldn't learn the job – but because they don't speak Spanish.
Apparently, a short time before Stimson announced the plant closure, the Forest Service settled a lawsuit in the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals ("all leftist all the time") and agreed that they would have to hire more Latino employees.
The Mexican American Legal Defense Fund brought the suit and gloated that the settlement would force the Forest Service to impose this decision in every single area and district nationwide.
Although numerous Supreme Court cases say racial preferences are unconstitutional, the leftists who control the 9th Circuit Court, and leftist groups like the Mexican American Legal Defense Fund, could care less.
You can't keep a leftist down. They don't give a tinker's damn about how many Supreme Court cases have supposedly settled the issue. Consistently, they show naked aggression and contempt toward the rule of law.
They are in business to impose sickening and stupid collectivist crap on everyone regardless of whom it destroys or how much it costs. They do it by a never-ending series of litigation.
The Bush administration faces a conundrum. Part of it deals with the situation in places like Libby. The other part has to do with a current racial preference court case in Michigan. Another aspect is the invasion of the United States by people who have no respect or background in maintaining a republic based on the ideas inherent in the U.S. Constitution or Bill of Rights.
The Civil Rights Act of 1964
According to the original intent of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, racial preferences or quotas should have never been an issue. Yet the Supreme Court has dealt with that very issue on numerous occasions.
Nonetheless, the left both in and out of the federal court system never takes no for an answer. The current Michigan racial preference case up before the Supreme Court deals with racial preferences and the quota system at the University of Michigan Law School. The school is seeking to continue admitting students not on merit alone, but on racial preferences as part of the process.
Whatever happened to a colorblind society? Whatever happened to fairness and justice? What ever happened to the other court cases that should have decided this issue?
Obviously, some courts like the 9th Circuit as well as organizations like the University of Michigan pay scant attention to what has gone before. Like constant rain on a mountain, they are very successful at wearing away the colorblind nature of our Constitution and rule of law. They do so one case at a time.
However, I would remind those who refer to the Civil Rights Act of 1964 as the well of wisdom on racial issues of the following. According to John Fonte of the Hudson Institute:
"On April 9, 1964, Hubert Humphrey replied to the allegation that Title VII on employment discrimination would lead to racial preferences by stating, 'If the Senator can find in Title VII any language which provides that an employer will have to hire on the basis of percentage or quota related to color, race, religion, or national origin, I will start eating the pages one after another, because it is not in there.' " (Senator Hubert Horatio Humphrey was the point man on the Civil Rights Act of 1964.)
Fonte adds: "To ensure that the bill would not be misinterpreted to promote racial and gender preferences, the pro-civil rights forces added an amendment to Title VII, Section 703 (j) that stated, 'Nothing contained in this title shall be interpreted to require any employer to grant preferential treatment to any individual or any group because of race, color, religion, sex, or national origin on account of an imbalance which may exist with respect to the total number or percentage of persons of any race, color, religion, or sex, or national origin in comparison with the total number or percentage of persons in any community or in any available work force.' "
Tell it to the Judge
Tell this to the 9th Circuit Court. Tell it to the Democrat and Republican establishment. Tell it to the University of Michigan.
Tell it to the collectivist corporate and religious greens who continually beat up the rural poor. These same greens impose their unscientific and heartless, cult-like beliefs on the rest of us. What is worse, they make money doing it and the money is often our tax dollars.
Tell it to the Forest Service and all the other federal green bureaucracies which act in an irresponsible despotic manner. Playing life-and-death games with human lives and livelihoods is unconscionable and wrong.
I don't know about you, but I am fed up. If Congress won't do anything to change this, if the administration won't demand the end to racial preferences, then our government is cheating us. It is not doing what it was intended to do and one of those things is to remember that every person is equal before the law.
It proves that justice is now meant for those chosen by our elites to receive it. Justice is solely for those who are the approved "victim" race or ethnic group.
Someone has to neuter out-of-control courts like the 9th Circuit. One way to do that is to appoint judges who stick by the Constitution and understand Article I, Section 8, Clause 17. Few of the lower courts pay attention to the limitations placed on the federal leviathan by the Ninth and 10th amendments to the Constitution.
Something has to be done to stop the insanity of litigious greens and their platoons of trial lawyers. I suggest a RICO (racketeering) lawsuit. Personally, I believe rural America has a case.
If there were true justice, the lawyers, greens, foundations and sycophants in the federal green agencies and media would be hit with treble damages under RICO. If you look at the facts, there has been collusion to prevent individuals and groups from pursuing their livelihoods. The civil rights of rural Americans have been grossly violated.
In the Michigan case regarding racial preferences, I am betting the Supreme Court will do what it has done in the past. Once again racial preferences will be deemed unconstitutional. But I will guarantee that it will not stop the leftist establishment from continuing to pursue racial preferences.
That is one reason the legal system must be turned around to bite them on their heartless, collectivist butts. Hurt them where it counts – in the pocket book.
End the tax-free ride. End grants given to groups that sue the federal government and then use the grants to destroy the right of the public to access public lands or erode private property rights.
End the practice of allowing groups to benefit financially from those lawsuits. If they mean business and it is really about the environment or "justice," they will accept a win based on the merits of a decision and the facts of the case. It shouldn't matter to them whether or not they reap financial benefit from it.
In that regard, end tax-free status for American foundations. They have had a free ride for too long.
Then make sure every Democrat possible is voted out of office. After that, start on the collectivist RINOs (Republicans In Name Only).
When you vote, demand that everyone who receives your vote understands the Constitution and the limitations it places on government. Make sure they do not reward the elite, who will stomp on "the little guy" unless they are kept in check.
Pressure the Bush administration to appoint the most conservative judges Possible, especially in courts like the 9th Circuit.
Put big pressure on the administration to reform and hire people in the federal green agencies who are not trying to impose a collectivist or green agenda on rural areas – or anywhere else, for that matter.
If you are not outraged, you should be. The acceptance of selective justice for preferred minorities, sexes, ethnics and illegal and legal immigrants, and special treatment for politically correct groups like environmentalists has got to stop.
In the meantime, the people of Libby, Montana, and places like it are suffering because no one is paying attention to the injustice of their plight. Meanwhile, we continue to reward the cynical collectivists, grasping classes and racial warriors in our midst.
Finally, preferential treatment for any group flies in the face of the U.S. Constitution, the Bill of Rights and the Rule of Law. Our leaders, courts and the powers that be seem to have forgotten that.
Next time: What is happening with immigration? Destroying communities in Minnesota and Maine and remaking this nation into Gangs of New York redux. The myths perpetrated by the open-borders crowd. |
