We're subsidizing the western land-grabbers

From Robert Reich

Last Saturday, armed men took over the offices of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge, in Harney County, Oregon. Ammon Bundy, leader of this group, and his father, the Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy, style themselves as part of a Western movement to take land back for the people from the federal government. But that’s not what’s really going on. (After all, most of these lands once belonged to Native Americans.)

The real fight is over how much the rest of us will continue to subsidize the Bundys and other privateers -- private logging contractors who are allowed to cut vast tracts of federal forest at subsidized rates, ranchers who pay grazing fees on some 300 acres of public lands at rates far below the market rate, private mining companies that now extract about a billion dollars a year of minerals from public lands without paying royalties, and farmers who benefit from the federal Bureau of Reclamation’s irrigation systems that make arid land capable of producing crops.

The Bundys and their allies oppose efforts to protect the environment because they want even more of these subsidized benefits. I’d rather protect what’s left of the environment.

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