This blog is closed
I sawed down the Sierra, planned Galleria Alley above the
Moro Rock, the mountain red states
Like red flowers on the slopes of gold; from your
base base a Bushery of Christian Green,
Furs and planes to raze national monuments for pilgrimage
In DC I sent Indians to Swiss banks, hyped dark
oil of Alaskus, no drunk like you there;
But that was Abramoff; you are only a shrubbery
clearing the forest for the trees.
Posted by: Chris Clarke
Note: A database glitch in 2008 ate a bunch of archived comments. Don't be offended if yours isn't here, or confused if the conversation seems disjointed. Thanks!
Good one. I can see this as part of a series, an unfortunately endless series as the house of cards collapses.
By: By Lance Mannion on 2006 03 11
Perfect.
By: By cali on 2006 03 11
not to mention the Mongol horde bulldozer attack of the Lewis and Clark Trail forest. As my buddy Mike wrote at the time:
On a bright sunny Memorial Day Weekend, an act of vandalism was committed as the Freddies launched an assault on the Lewis and Clark Trail, dispatching loggers into old-growth forest in an undesignated roadless area directly adjacent to the historic trail, even using the trail to get access to the pockets of live, healthy trees that survived the Wendover Fire of 2003.
Although the sale was presented as a way to use fire-killed or severely damaged trees in a timely manner to provide social and economic benefits, all of the trees felled in Unit two of the three planned cuts were large, green, healthy trees while none of the dead trees were cut. They sought out and destroyed the very trees that were the subject of the lawsuit and only those trees.
On Wednesday, Karen Lindholdt, a lawyer for The Lands Council, based in Spokane, Wash. asked District Court Judge Edward Lodge to grant a temporary restraining order to halt the logging on the grounds that it violated the law. Judge Lodge has agreed to look into it and rule quickly. As of this post, Lodge has yet to make a decision. The fact that he has not ruled against the temporary restraining order yet is good news. We will keep you updated.
This desecration of an historic and ecologically significant stand of old-growth forest is just the latest example of the Bush administration’s categorical exclusion rule, which allow the Freddies to bypass federal laws designed to protect old growth and roadless areas on the National Forests by simply declaring it fire salvage.
Freddies of course being the Forest Servive and BLM members of the golden hordes, riding into the virgin lands of old growth and ancient stands and, just as their bosses in DC, ignoring court orders and all known laws, do as they please with regard to extracting resources. Someday there may be a last hurrah of this Mongol horde, but i am growing ever more depressingly confident they won’t do it without first mowing through us. Or, seeing the story on the Huff Post today about the Pomona College Professor, they already are.
By: By spyder on 2006 03 11
not to overdue a point, but here is yet another sanction of Norton, this time by the UN..
UNITED NATIONS - A United Nations committee took the rare step Friday of assailing the U.S. government for violating Native Americans’ land rights and said Washington had run afoul of an international anti-racism treaty.
The independent Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (CERD) said Friday it had ‘‘credible information alleging that the Western Shoshone indigenous people are being denied their traditional rights to land’’ and asked federal authorities to cease all activities on tribal land—including efforts to set up commercial mining operations.
Native American advocates hailed the finding as a victory.
‘‘This is a tremendous victory for the Shoshone people,’’ said Laura Inouye of the aid group Oxfam America. ‘‘The UN decision acknowledges the U.S. government’s violations of Shoshone civil, political, economic, and cultural rights.’‘
‘’‘'Hopefully, they will now be granted the justice that the US government has denied them for years,’’ added Inouye, whose organization had backed the Western Shoshone.
Some non-natives also refer to the Western Shoshone as ‘‘Snake Indians’’ although in their own language tribe members are called Newe people.
U.S. officials were unavailable for immediate comment on the decision, which effectively challenged the U.S. government’s assertion of federal ownership of 90 percent of Shoshone lands covering about 60 million acres and stretching across the states of Nevada, Idaho, Utah, and California.
The United States recognized Western Shoshone rights to the land under the 1863 Treaty of Ruby Valley. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 1979 that the pact gave Washington trusteeship over tribal lands, however. The federal government, saying that tribe members had abandoned traditional land tenure and practices and citing ‘‘gradual encroachment’’ by non-natives as evidence, has claimed much of the land as federal territory.
The Western Shoshone, in their petition to the UN panel, countered that ‘‘gradual encroachment’’ in fact took place as part of a U.S. policy to steal their lands, and that this constituted racism.
The 18-member UN panel of experts, set up to monitor global compliance with the 1969 International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination, last August asked Washington to respond to those claims. Federal authorities missed a year-end deadline to do so.
On Friday, the Geneva-based panel said Washington’s claim to the land ‘‘did not comply with contemporary human rights norms, principles, and standards that govern determination of indigenous property rights.’’
By: By spyder on 2006 03 11
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