With its monopoly over both law enforcement and “justice,” the state has seen to it that systematic theft serves as legal precedent.
“Long before Cliven Bundy faced down federal agents,” reports Fox News (who else?), “in his dispute with the Bureau of Land Management over grazing rights, fellow Nevada rancher Raymond Yowell, an 84-year-old former Shoshone chief, watched as the BLM seized his herd.”
Adding to that, since 2008 they’ve taken his money as well — in the form of a piece of his Social Security checks.
Yowell’s 132 head of cattle had grazed for decades on the South Fork Western Shoshone Indian Reservation in northeastern Nevada until 2002, when the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) — the same agency at odds with Bundy — seized them. The federal agency sold the cattle at auction and used the proceeds to pay off the portion of back grazing fees it claimed Yowell owed. Once the cattle was sold, the agency sent Yowell a bill for the outstanding balance, some $180,000. They’ve been garnishing his monthly Social Security checks since 2008 to satisfy the debt Yowell says he does not owe.
Tommy Henderson is another victim of state plunder of private property:
The Bureau of Land Management [BLM] took 140 acres of his property and didn’t pay him one cent.
Now, they want to use his case as precedent to seize land along a 116-mile stretch of the river …
In “Into the Cannibal’s Pot,” the issue of land grabs by the ANC, in South Africa, was addressed extensively, down to the heart-breaking mutilation of livestock by state-supported squatters, in the effort to hasten the ethnic cleansing of the Afrikaner farmer. The parallels to what is underway in the USA are greater than even I had foreseen.
Related: “Republicans warn BLM eyeing land grab along Texas-Oklahoma border.”