A small handful of very distant bureaucrats
More on the “thinking” behind this No National Monuments For You move:
Trump told a rally in Salt Lake City that he came to “reverse federal overreach”
What is that even supposed to mean? How is it “overreach” to keep public land for public use? Why is that called “overreach” in contrast to handing the public land over to private developers to exploit and damage? Why isn’t it “federal overreach” for Mr Pinchyhand to bounce in and remove protections from public land?
Trump told a rally in Salt Lake City that he came to “reverse federal overreach” and took dramatic action “because some people think that the natural resources of Utah should be controlled by a small handful of very distant bureaucrats located in Washington.”
So by that logic there should be no public lands at all, right? So there should be no national parks, no freeways, no dams, no federal courts, no federal anything, because the country is just too damn big, is that it? But in that case what does Trump think he’s doing? Why is one very distant racist sexist pig located in Washington better than a small handful of very distant bureaucrats located in Washington?
But also, there’s “controlled.” What “controlled” means here is protected, preserved, shielded from harm and damage, kept for gentle public use as opposed to destructive exploitation. It means conservation…which you would think conservatives would see the point of.
It’s public. It’s for all of us. Trump, like the lying scum that he is, is framing it as if a few people in Washington were keeping us all out when in fact it’s private ownership or exploitation that would do that.
“They don’t know your land, and truly, they don’t care for your land like you do,” he said.
“Care for”? But the whole point is to remove the land from protection so that it can be exploited and damaged for the profit of a tiny few.
It’s Malheur all over again, of course – those ridiculous cowboys grabbing a federal wildlife reserve because they wanted ranchers to be able to exploit it (for free, of course) instead of leaving it undamaged for wildlife and people who like to observe and study wildlife.
And somehow they get away with the absurd reversal.
I was just talking about federal lands not 10 minutes ago in class; at this point, I am tempted to remove anything about protected lands from my lecture, because it hurts too much to talk about it. We were talking about the (nearly free) cheap grazing rights…our state has a Senator who ran for office mostly because she was worried that the Congress would raise the price of grazing (not sure why she thought that was a worry). She holds a number of these permits, and has made an enormous fortune selling that right to other people for a lot more than she pays the government.
And…she just voted to give herself an enormous tax cut, to boot. So the federal government made her rich, and now they can’t even ask for a tiny bit of it back.
I was thinking that it would be good to make the point that “a small handful of very distant bureaucrats located in Washington.” would be much better written as “a small handful of democratically elected representatives (and their subordinates) working for and on behalf of the public located in Washington”. For a moment, I thought that I was quite clever for having done so, and was happy.
Then I realised that Fuckface von Clownstick is himself a democratically elected representative working… on exactly the kind of things he said he would work on, on the behalf of those who elected him, located in Washington. So I was reminded once again that I am not nearly as clever as I sometimes like to think I am, and was considerably less happy. :-(
Damn you all to hell!
Karellen, the problem with that is, he wasn’t really democratically elected. He was elected in an undemocratic process that gave the office to the person who won fewer votes – 3 million fewer votes – than his opponent. So he is an undemocratically elected official, working only for about 18% of the electorate, and doing exactly what he wants to do, which happens to correspond with a minority of the electorate who managed to steal the election legally.
“And somehow they get away with the absurd reversal.”
I think the “somehow” might be explained by tribal anti-intellectualism. “We got control of the land away from people who aren’t like us, those weird egghead freaks with their nature worshipping, and we got it under the control of people like us, people who understand that land was given to us by god to use however we like for our purposes.”
Furthermore, it’s not really “democratic” in the widest sense to elect people the way we do – with massive “contributions” from capitalists with interests they want served, and with no formal or informal system to prevent lying to the electorate. It’s not a reasoned, truth-based contest between people acting in good faith, it’s a circus of manipulation and theatrics and trickery. It’s more demagoguery than democracy.
@Iknklast – the election was made by the people (“demos”), using a well-defined set of rules that were clearly established and agreed upon before the election process began.
Now, not everyone likes the election rules, but the rules for changing those rules are also clearly defined, and not enough people have managed to agree on whether to change them and if so what to change them to. Despite this happening a number of times before in fairly recent memory.
So, 50%+1 of the people who voted did not put Trump in first place on their ballot, but that is not the only possible interpretation of “democracy”. And even though I despise the result, I don’t think it’s productive to claim that the process was undemocratic, or that Trump was not democratically elected. You might as well claim that no president in the history of The US was democratically elected, because far fewer that 50% of the people *eligible* to vote did not vote for them. It’s an interesting idea to consider, but has little practical application.
Karellen, I maintain that it was undemocratic (and will acknowledge that most if not all of our presidents have not been democratic in that sense), but…in this case, as in the case of only 2 other presidents in history, the people actually voted for the other candidate. A set of undemocratic rules put in place by people who wanted to make sure the election stayed in the hands of landed farmers that were not really “agreed upon” by people who don’t actually realize this is the case does not turn this into a “democratic” election.
Just because the election is legal does not mean it is democratic.