Police State

The temporarily paused range war in Nevada and land use conflicts in the west are more complex than the media presents.

"The image of the American West as a place of private property and blissful independence from government control has long been a myth, and the fact is that life in the West has involved the federal government much more so than life in the East much of the time. This is because the land and other natural resources in the West are controlled by a vast socialist bureaucracy governing water, land, and minerals going back to the late nineteenth century. Certainly, within the larger framework of federal control, heavily asserted by a central government bloated by the Civil War, there were many communities that did live extremely independently and in ways that might be considered anarchistic. However, since the 1890s, the overall economy of the American West is best viewed as one that has been dominated by federal land ownership, regulation, subsidies, and bureaucracy. "

Bundy seems to have changed his mind when the BLM stopped doing what he wanted. Of course he did. His family homesteaded that property for over a century. Also not mentioned in these stories is how and when the Feds took control of the property which apparently they didn't have at the beginning.

"When I look at this, it’s hard to not see this as just a dispute between different rent-seeking interest groups trying to profit off federal lands. Bundy now says that the feds don’t have a right to own land. Bundy is far too moderate for me of course, since I dispute that any state has the moral right to own land, but it’s quite clear that the legal right of the American state to own land was well established in the 19th century."

But when and why was the land "transfered" to the Feds? That seems to be at the core of Bundy's dispute. That's the state's rights issue he talks about that is not addressed in these articles.

How the US used subterfuge and aggression to seize control of so much western land.

More on the planned assault.

"According to Mack, the so-called retreat was nothing more than theatrics. “It was a ploy to get people to back off, to get people out of the way. They weren’t expecting us to get this amount of people here. They were surprised by the numbers and so they wanted a way to get us out of here. This was a ploy to get us out of here and then they’re going after the Bundys.”  Mack said that when he was at the Bundy ranch on Saturday there were an estimated 600 to 800 protesters present when federal agents were releasing the cattle."

Exactly as expected.

FBI building facial recognition database with 52 million photos. They expect to have 1/3 of Americans in database by next year.

Police building database of car movements with license plate readers.