The Oregon occupation
is capitalist to its core. Ranching is a globalized industry that has had
dramatic effects on the climate and physical landscape of North America. It is
enabled by and entwined with the state to at least as great a degree as the
state acts as a hindrance upon it. Cattle ranching's early 20th century boom
occurred precisely because of (rather than in spite of) the federal
government's control of so much of the West, which allowed ranchers access to
wide expanses of grazing lands. In Oregon, as elsewhere, the expansion of
ranching as a business required both cheap access to federal land and the
parceling of land formerly allotted to reservations under the Dawes Act of
1886.
Southeastern Oregon was Northern Paiute Indigenous
territory. In the 1870s, "Malheur" - French for
"misfortune" or "tragedy" - was the name of a reservation
created for the Northern Paiute people by the federal government. That
reservation was dissolved, and hundreds of people were removed to Washington,
following the Bannock War of 1878. Still, many Northern Paiutes remained in
Harney County, Oregon. As Indian Country Today notes, both the Burns Paiute
Tribal Office and the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge today sit where the
Malheur Reservation once did, on land where Northern Paiutes have lived for
centuries. In his 1999 book Dispossessing the Wilderness: Indian Removal and
the Making of the National Parks, historian Mark David Spence argues that the
historical concurrence between "Indian removal" and the creation of
the first national parks (and wildlife refuges) between the 1870s and the end
of the 1910s was no coincidence. Making the West a wilderness required
removing, restricting and confining the Indigenous people who had populated the
landscape that European-Americans viewed as a "scenic playground, national
symbol, and sacred remnant of God's original handiwork." Americans, Spence
writes, "are able to cherish their national parks today largely because
native peoples either abandoned them involuntarily or were forcefully
restricted to reservations." Spence adds that "uninhabited wilderness
had to be created before it could be preserved," and thus preserving the
"wilderness" and excluding or removing Indigenous people went hand in
hand. The creation of Malheur National Wildlife Refuge, among the oldest such
refuges in the western United States, was animated by similar logics of
preserving nature for Euro-American appreciation and consumption.
Federal lands are at the center of a growing political
struggle over the concept of property rights. Making up one-third of the
nation, the public domain is by federal agencies, such as the Forest Service
and Bureau of Land Management, and encompasses what remains of the nation’s
valuable minerals, old growth forests, native grasslands and the extremely
valuable oil and gas reserves—from the Rocky Mountain Front to the outer
continental shelf. Much of this territory has been grotesquely transformed over
the last half century by big companies into kind of industrial wasteland,
consisting of atomic and other bombing ranges, ammo dumps, military and energy
facilities, strip mines, clearcuts, dammed, dredged and scoured rivers, and
leaching mounds of cyanide. Still, though victim to decades of abuse and
neglect, the public lands also hold the last remnants of wild America, its
salmon and trout, elk, grizzlies, spotted owls and wolves, its ancient forests,
deserts and mountains.
The Wise Use Movement consists of more than a thousand local
organizations across the country, representing roughly three million
people—people who fear the infringement of their property rights, mostly by
what they see as oppressive federal government regulations. Even though the
Wise Use movement may attract people form diverse political and ideological
heritages, it was also lustily embraced (and some might say co-opted) by Newt
Gingrich and Dick Armey’s anti-government revolution of the 1990s. Today the
Wise Use movement nestles among the rightwing organizations and tendencies of
the post-Bush Republican Party. Some of
these groups are simply out for money: they want the federal government to pay
them considerable sums in exchange for changing traditional uses of their
property that have run afoul of federal laws or even in exchange for cutbacks
in the commercial use of public lands or resources. Custom and culture, they
call it. Other Wise Use groups have congealed as a political force to demand
unrestricted access to federal lands, whether it be to log, run cattle, or for
less than environmentally friendly recreational pursuits, such as off-road
motorcycling or snowmobiling. Corporate America has also invested heavily in
certain factions of the Wise Use movement, using them as a grassroots stalking
horse in their efforts to the preserve the archaic system of laws and
regulations that allow them heavily subsidized entry to the natural wealth of
the public domain. The big transnationals are intensifying their efforts to
exploit the land, notably through the revival of gold mining and wide-spread
oil and gas drilling.
The Wise Use movement see themselves as being engaged in a
high-stakes chess game with the elite legions of the environmental movement,
who are covertly carrying out a sinister master plan, a vast socialist
experiment to depopulate the rural West. As evidence they point to the
Wildlands Project and to quotes from various greens calling for a 50 percent
reduction in North America’s population by the year 2100. The Wise Use movement
often suggests that the real goal of the environmental movement is to clear
rural Westerners off the land, so the West can be turned into an “eco-theme
park” for the pleasures of vacationing suburbanites. In order to advance their
socialist agenda, the Wise Users argue, environmental infiltrated the federal
government. Under Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, the thinking goes, embedded
key leaders into powerful positions inside the EPA, Interior and Agriculture
Departments, and then, acting through their positions on government regulatory
bodies, the environmentalists have set out to first reduce and then eliminate
all grazing and logging on public lands and sharly curtail mining by driving up
the cost of doing business. Environmentalists are viewed as having covertly
turned fights over such seemingly innocent creatures as the coho salmon,
northern spotted owl and gray wolf into national symbols of a broad land use
planning instrument, a kind of bureaucratic club wielded against rural
landowners. On the Wise Use movement’s enemies list is the National Biological
Survey in 1993—known in the ominous parlance of the Wise Use movement as the
NBS. “The NBS is fascist, man, it’s socialist,” proclaimed Chuck Cushman, head
of the American Land Rights Association, based in Battle Ground, Washington.
“These guys map your property with infrared satellite photos, looking for plants,
you know, then they can actually come on your property without your permission.
If they find one of those plants, you know you’re screwed worse than if they
found dope.”
In the minds of sagebrush populists, the real menace lies
not with the environmentalists, but with the political and financial powers
that prop them up. It is the big East Coast foundations who now provide the
principle financing of the big green organizations that are pulling the
strings. And who is behind these foundations? The Rockefellers, the Pews, the
Mellons and other titanic American families made rich through the Standard Oil
trust and the like. Through their securities portfolios, naturally, these
foundations are interlocked with the multinational corporations that run the
world, and who eye the public estate as a source of cheap wealth when times get
hard. And thus it is, according to Hage and his followers, that the small
rancher in the Interior West is driven off the land by Forest Service and BLM
rangers who are nothing more or less than federal agents of the Rockefellers.
Wayne Hage in his manifesto titled ‘Storm Over Rangelands’,
points to Carl Schurz, Interior Secretary under President Rutherford B. Hayes and
wrote that “Schurz’s efforts to prevent the establishment of private property
rights on the public lands may have sprung from his socialist background.
Schurz was a controversial German immigrant who had fought along with Karl Marx
in the Revolution of 1848, came to America, was elected senator from Missouri
and supported the radical Republican’s reconstruction plans.” Hage, argues with
the nation deeply in debt after the Civil War, the European banking houses, led
by the Rothschilds, conspired with the federal government to use the western lands
as collateral against repayment of the war debt. The government reneged on the
Spanish land grants and sent the cavalry out to kill off the Indians, who had
real and justifiable land claims, to clear away any obstacles to this loan
repayment scheme. The European financial interests joined forces with the big
East Coast families to build the railroads, control the new towns and farms
and, through the American Cattle Trust, turn the livestock business into a huge
monopoly. According to Hage’s history, western lands were set aside through the
conservation movement, starting with Yellowstone National Park, then Yosemite.
These shrines to conservation were, according to Hageian theory, part of a vast
project of “nationalization,” the equivalent, Hage wrote, of the “crown lands”
in England.
The preservation of nature thus functioned as an enclosure
of the commons, a process that lies at the heart of the historical and ongoing
process that Karl Marx termed "so-called primitive accumulation." In
17th century and 18th century Europe, enclosures expropriated the peasants from
the land and violently transformed them into wage laborers possessing nothing
but their labor power, which they were forced to sell in order to survive. The
"extirpation, enslavement and entombment in mines of the aboriginal
population" of the Americas, was, alongside slavery, one the "chief
momenta" of this process. In the western United States, enclosure meant
fencing what had been held in common, transforming it into (public) property,
and thus dispossessing and immiserating Indigenous people and producing nature
as a collective patrimony of white settlers. The Bundys and other ranchers have
benefitted from these enclosures for well over a century, but now they want to
further enclose what is already enclosed, to privatize what the Northern
Paiutes had to be dispossessed of before the land could be made public. Nature
preservation has often itself been a form of enclosure.
Bundy and his followers do not want to end the enclosures,
but instead to carve out their own enclosures within the shell of the state's. On
January 6, leaders of the Burns Paiute Tribe demanded that the occupiers leave.
Tribal chair Charlotte Rodrique accused the Bundy militia of
"desecrating" a sacred site. Tribal council member Jarvis Kennedy
recounted the violent history of the Northern Paiutes' dispossession, arguing,
"We weren't removed; we were killed," and demanded that the armed men
"get the hell out." Rodrique and Kennedy's accounts challenge
simplistic explanations of the occupation as a populist uprising against
government overreach, insisting instead that it be viewed through the lens of
the United States' long history of racist violence and expropriation. The
Bundys and their ilk want free land to do with as they please without any
consequences for damage to the environment, water, or neighbors. In that sense
they are "takers." Capitalism is piracy. Oregon is a shining example
of that piracy. Buccaneers acting with impunity. Above and outside
the law. The media is complicit. You don't give an arsonist terrorist or
insurrectionist a microphone.
Our goal as socialists is to maximize universal well-being.
This is the goal of the people, when we are best able to think for ourselves
and take care of ourselves.
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