What’s happening to us?
One such mind belongs to basketball champion turned actor
and best-selling author, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, whose Monday commentary on
Ferguson for Time Magazine bore the chilling headline, “The Coming Race
War Won’t Be About Race.”
It will be about class warfare, he predicted — the
powerful and wealthy elite against the 50 million Americans who are poor —
black, Latino, and white. “Fifty million voters is a powerful block if they
ever organized in an effort to pursue their common economic goals,”
Abdul-Jabbar wrote.
This great icon’s class warfare insight reaches farther
than he knows, into the multi-millions of marginalized, demonized, and despised
workers of the resource class — loggers, coal miners, cattle ranchers,
commercial fishermen, oil rig roustabouts, tunnel blasters, heavy equipment
operators, and on and on — every one of us who gets dirty hands making the
stuff of elite splendor and majesty. And, yes, I once shoveled foundation
trenches and shouldered kegs of ten-penny brights (nails) for a living.
All these hardworking people are mocked, devalued, and
destroyed by Big Green’s privileged few, as told in the recent Senate
report, “How a Club of
Billionaires and Their Foundations Control the Environmental Movement and
Obama’s EPA.” It’s a class warfare warning.
Natural Resources Defense Council President Frances
Beinecke (heiress of the Sperry & Hutchinson fortune, see photo) doesn’t
help the poor with their economic goals using her $427,595 annual compensation
or the group’s $241.8 million assets, but ruins every resource worker possible.
The Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation’s chief investment
officer, Denise Strack, doesn’t help the poor with their economic goals using
her $1.6 million annual compensation or the foundation’s $5.6 billion assets
from the Intel fortune, but helps ruin every resource worker possible.
Big Green conducts class war with its power over the
federal government.
If that sounds impossible, let me tell you a story.
On July 27, 1991, thirty U.S. Forest Service
agents on horseback, some armed with semi-automatic weapons and wearing
bulletproof vests, raided rancher Wayne Hage’s cattle in Meadow Canyon in the
Toiyabe National Forest, high in the mountains of central Nevada. The cows were
drinking from disputed water and were to be impounded that day, destroying
Hage’s livelihood — and dooming some of the meat supply that gave minimum-wage
urban burger flippers something to flip.
The agents hoped to infuriate Hage into violence and kill
him. However, he showed up with a camera, immortalized them on film, sued them,
and after years in a federal court, won a ruling that he owned the water. The
Forest Service had no right to impound his cattle.
A court document showed that David Young, special agent
in charge of the raid, had personally brought with him several Remington Model
870 pump-action 12 gauge shotguns, Ruger Mini-14 semi-automatic rifles, Sig
Sauer P220 .45 caliber semi-automatic pistols and a Smith & Wesson Model 36
.38 caliber revolver.
On April 2, 1990, Deputy Chief of the U.S. Forest Service
James C. Overbay sent a letter to his subordinate regional foresters, urging
support of environmentalists
in return for their help supporting larger Forest Service fish and
wildlife budgets, removal of ranchers, and expansion of USFS authority and
power. It said:
Conservation groups representing the organized wildlife and fish
interests across the country have given considerable effort, time, and money to
help the Forest Service promote these important programs. We need the support
of these groups to avoid possible reductions in fish and wildlife budgets. They
would like to see the results of these efforts. We owe this to them.
A little over a year later, the Forest Service paid off
rich environmentalists by ruining Wayne Hage. The service’s culture of resource
stewardship was drifting far from its conservation roots to political
obsequiousness and ostentatious zeal.
Overbay had already devastated other ranchers with less
publicity, but it was the Hage raid that reinforced Cliven Bundy’s
misguided beliefs about federal authority and led to President Obama’s
Bureau of Land Management storming the Bundy ranch from attack helicopters
duded up in military-grade body armor, flashing short-barreled assault rifles,
and crashing around in armored vehicles – enough combat equipment to remove the
tinfoil hat stigma from the black helicopter crowd’s collective head.
As John Steinbeck famously wrote in The Grapes of Wrath:
“Repression works only to strengthen and
knit the oppressed.” A rabble in arms materialized from all over the West
to protect the Bundy ranch – ready to die. It was blatant armed insurrection,
but federal prudence prevailed and the BLM stood down – prosecutors are dealing
with it now.
The militarization of federal agencies has a long history
but should have a short future. Big Green’s federal power grip needs to be
smashed and its storm troopers disarmed.
In June, Rep. Chris Stewart, R-Utah, introduced the
Regulatory Agency Demilitarization Act, to stem the trend of
federal regulatory agencies developing SWAT-like teams.
Maybe it’s unrealistic, but perhaps Abdul-Jabbar could
recommend a diplomatic mission from the poor to the reviled workers of the
resource class, put aside any past hurts and hates for a while, and organize in
an effort to pursue their common economic goals.
Ron Arnold is a
free enterprise activist, author, and newspaper columnist. He pioneered methods
to expose the money and power of Big Green in nine books and hundreds of
magazine and newspaper articles. He mentors promising activists and writers as
a civic duty.
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