Transfer of Federal Lands to the States

highplainsdrifter wrote:

Cliven Bundy owes the American citizens more than a million dollars in unpaid grazing fees. He is now facing numerous federal charges and may end up in prison. I would think you could have picked a better hero to symbolize local control.

http://www.cnn.com/2016/02/16/us/cliven-bundy-bail-hearing-oregon/


It was a name known here. How about Raymond Yowell, a former Shoshone Chief:

Long before Cliven Bundy faced down federal agents 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.

"There’s a definite pattern in the West, beginning in the 1990s, maybe in the late '80s, of what I feel are illegal cattle seizures," Yowell said. "[Bundy's case] is the latest example of that pattern.”

While Bundy is defying the federal agency over fees for grazing cattle on government-owned land, Yowell's cattle had roamed reservation land. But a 1979 Supreme Court decision held that even land designated for Indian reservations is held in trust for them, and thus subject to BLM regulation. Yowell says treaties that led to creation of the reservation granted him and other herdsmen the right to graze cattle on the land, which they did successfully for decades. The Western Shoshone say they have never relinquished their right to the territory.

http://www.foxnews.com/us/2014/04/22/nevada-rancher-former-indian-chief-range-war-with-blm-predates-cliven-bundy.html

I don't know the actual facts in the above cases, but I know better than just to take the Fed's word for it. But, today's BLM and FS is not your Grandfather's BLM and FS. They are NOT your friends.

What about my FEDDOT question?

LS