WESTERN STATES HAVE HAD ENOUGH

Are you native American, Mike? Or are you just another squatting white-boy whose defense of “freedom” only begins when the government that stole the land on your behalf wants to take it back for itself?

Yup, native American 100%. Born in Pennsylvania, thanks for asking numbnuts!

Wyoming ,mike ,..you an Injun to ?Well fuck me .Proud America to ?I bet you are .Thank God for injuns like you .All this time I thought you were just another guilt ridden pussy white boy like Pete.

Wyoming ,are you suffering from an inverse inferiority complex ?A lot of injuns have that condition.

Pete – your general point re Jackson is correct, but it was the Choctaw he sent on the Trail. The Cherokee Trail came later.

Wyoming – the point is you put up the pic of Jackson. It is similar to putting up a pic of Hitler, far as I am concerned. Jackson was responsible for genocide, make no mistake about it. That folks treat him like a hero re his position on banks, while ignoring his involvement in mass murder is despicable. Perhaps you are unaware of his atrocities. He was a piece of shit and should not be used in a positive light.

bb has done much better of late. I no longer consider him the village idiot. Some of his stuff is excellent, some not. Just like the rest of the folks around here.

By the way, I always have admired Wyoming Mike. He made a mistake in my opinion re Jackson, but shit happens.

El coyote ,LIpoh ,.thanks .I am trying but it’s hard sometimes .I think my heart is growing cold .I regret some of the things I post.

So the Western states have had enough, huh?

Gimme a break.

Aside from the forced evacuation of the native population, the western states only exist because the federal government spent tax money generated in the industrial powerhouses of the northeast and midwest, who have been forced to subsidize their own destruction and depopulation since the late 19th century.

The settlement of the west and its viability as a place to live owes COMPLETELY to the efforts of the Federal Government, using money that could only come from the taxpayers at large. It was the northeast and the midwest that built Union Pacific’s heavily subsidized transcontinental railroad, which would not have been possible without government subsidies, because it made no economic sense at all to build a railroad thousands of miles long through uninhabited terrain, not to mention to bore through mountains to build it. It made no sense economically to erect mega-dams 200′ to 600′ ft high in largely unpopulated areas. Those dams were built by the Bureau of Reclamation, a government agency without which it would not be possible to supply cities of 1M people or more with water….. and might not be possible in a fuel short future lacking the resources to maintain the all the water infrastructure necessary to run the west, never mind the highways.

I have been watching the drama over the BLM’s “land grab” of Clive Bundy’s ranch with mild interest, and was at first rather sympathetic toward the guy until I did a little bit of digging, and uncovered the following easy-to-discover facts:

Clive Bundy does not only does not and never has owned his ranch, at least not in the sense we understand ownership to mean, and neither has his family. The Bundy ranch was established in 1951 on what was then property owned by the Federal government and leased by the Bundy family, in a lease arrangement that allowed the Bundys to use it much more cheaply than if they’d bought it.

Other ranchers in the area who are real owners of their ranches- that is, guys who BOUGHT AND PAID FOR their property and are owners of titles, regard ranchers like Bundy as “welfare ranchers”. One such owner-rancher stated that, and said that, while leasing a ranch is cheaper than owning it, that you pay a price, which is that you can be kicked off the property at any time and the owner- in this case, the government- can change the terms of your use at any time.

In short, Bundy is nothing but a deadbeat tenant and squatter who has no more right to squat on “his” ranch, just because his family has leased it for 60 years, than I have to squat in office space in a federal office building.

And if the western states want to secede, let them. No more money from Washington for those dams, and forget about poaching water from Lake Michigan or anyplace else in the midwest or northeast. They can then put that government-owned land on the market and let it be sold at market prices, which is what should have been done to begin with.

In the meantime, if you want a ranch, BUY it at market prices.

CHicago, money from Washington!!! Hilarious. We actually produce out here, unlike DC. Thanks for the belly laugh. We’ll secede tomorrow and watch your precious big cities go down.

Probably should, can’t buy him beers at Reed’s any more. He does get all my lucrative Amazon 6%’s.

The Palo Verde 500 kV switchyard is a key point in the western states power grid, and is used as a reference point in the pricing of electricity across the southwest United States. Many 500 kV power lines from companies like Southern California Edison and San Diego Gas & Electric send power generated at the plant to Los Angeles and San Diego via Path 46, respectively.

The Federal government should divest itself of land it is holding in the west by putting the land up for sale, at market prices. Just put it up for auction and sell it for whatever the market will bear. Never should so much land have been in the hands of the Feds to begin with, but one of the justifications for that was to provide ranchers with cheap common grazing grounds. Bad idea.

Let’s just sell it off to the highest bidder.

Then all the ranchers who are leasing this land can pay market prices for it…… or lease it on terms agreeable to themselves and the new owners. But when the new owner terminates your 60 year old lease and tells you to either pay your grazing fees or GTF off his property, you’d better just do that without whining about how your “rights” are being violated.

There never should have been so much land in government hands to begin with. But, again, had our government not robbed the taxpayers at large to run the native population off this land and claim it for American settlement, then financed the construction of all that road and water infrastructure from the western edge of Kansas clear to the CA coast, we would not be having this discussion, would we?

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I agree, SSS. Just because these lands always have been in Federal hands doesn’t mean they should continue to be.

The moral of the story here, really, is that all benefits come with costs and you should know the cost before you avail yourself of a benefit, like cheap land to graze your cattle on.