Last week more than 200 armed federal agents from the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) and other agencies, many decked out in camouflage uniforms, descended on the area around Bunkerville, a small town 70 miles northeast of Las Vegas, near Nevada’s borders with Arizona and Utah.
a show of force is necessary to remove Cliven Bundy’s cattle from “public lands” where they are, allegedly, damaging the “fragile” habitat of the protected desert tortoise.
More than 50 other ranchers have been bankrupted, intimidated, and forced to give up their land and legal property rights.
Chief Judge Robert C. Jones of the Federal District Court of Nevada issued a blistering decision that charged officials of the BLM and other agencies with malicious and criminal conduct, and actually engaging in a decades-long “conspiracy”
New American
The root of the Cliven Bundy affair.
A simple glance at the map above illustrates the unequal treatment given to states along and west of the front range of the Rocky Mountains.
Federal government’s ownership of the lands in the Western states:
Nevada: 84.5 percent
Alaska: 69.1 percent
Utah: 57.4 percent
Oregon: 53.1 percent
Idaho: 50.2 percent
Arizona: 48.1 percent
California: 45.3 percent
Wyoming: 42.4 percent
New Mexico: 41.8 percent
Colorado: 36.6 percent
Washington: 30.3 percent
Montana: 29.9 percent
Federal ownership of land in states east of the Front Range is mostly in the single digits with the exception of South Carolina and New Hampshire which barely make it into the teens.
The people of states east of the Rockies have a democratic say in land use for the majority of the land area of their states, those in the west do not.
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